Bibby Financial Services have acquired the client portfolio of Aston Rothbury Factors which apparently comprises just 40 clients and is considerably less than the 109 clients claimed in Business Money earlier this year.
Davenham is the latest factoring company to cease
It has been well known for a while that Davenham were in serious trouble and they have been pretending to lend recently rather than actually doing so.
The staff were told to expect a decision on the company’s future by the end of June and that future now seems to be that they are formally ceasing to write new business whilst the company enters “collect out” mode.
Whilst it is possible for them to collect out their loan book in a prudent and orderly manner as claimed by the company, one cannot do that with factoring so I hope that arrangements are in hand to transfer the book to another factoring company causing as little pain as possible in the process.
This is the third factoring company in a very short space of time to crash into the rocks following hard on the heels of Aston Rothbury a few days ago and Challenge a few months ago so let’s hope that this is the end of it now as it doesn’t do the industry any good at all.
Aston Rothbury has gone bust
Just a couple of hours after blogging that nothing much was happening in the world of factoring I was informed that Aston Rothbury had gone bust just three months after Business Money had said how refreshing it was to see what a change of management had done for the company.
Hopefully the cash flow of the clients will be unaffected as according to representatives of the Administrator, Aston Rothbury will continue to trade and has the continued support of Lloyds TSB.
Restaurants and eating out etc.
I haven’t added to the blog recently as there doesn’t seem to be much happening in the factoring world and I don’t wish to pad out the blog with boring rubbish about what factoring is or the difference between factoring and invoice discounting or other such banalities so I have just remained silent.
I was taken out to lunch today by one of my favourite factoring companies who reminded me that in the past I had taken gentle digs at them over their apparent poor treatment of me in the “entertainment stakes” but had omitted to mention that they had more than made up for it when the Chief Executive and four of his colleagues all came up to the Midlands to take me out for a rather nice dinner, arranging for a chauffeur driven limousine to pick me up in the process.
My comments were all very tongue in cheek but I must admit they surpassed themselves today by taking me out for lunch at San Giovanni a restaurant 15 minutes drive away from me that I had never even heard of, let alone eaten at before. Excellent food with quite a superb Pinot Grigio in a beautiful setting and needless to say good company (otherwise I would have politely declined the invitation.)
Perhaps if the factoring world continues to be quiet I should change this blog into a food review blog instead but in the meantime I can heartily recommend the wild mushroom risotto 🙂
Factoring statistics for 2009
Apologies for not updating the blog recently which was in part due to an extended vacation thanks to yet another misfortune emanating from Iceland plus the fact that there doesn’t seem to be anything of interest happening in the factoring world.
The final quarter’s stats for 2009 were recently published by the ABFA and the figures for all of 2009 make quite depressing reading with overall client numbers down by 10% but it’s when one starts to look carefully at individual statistics that it starts to get worrying.
The largest number of clients overall is in the 0 to £500,000 turnover category with 38% of all clients falling within this grouping. The number of clients in this group fell by 11% over the year but the worrying statistic is that overall advances to this group fell by a whopping 56.8% from £908m to £567m
At the end of 2008 the ABFA reported a total of 48,022 companies with either factoring or invoice discounting facilities and whilst this number fell to 43,590 by the end of 2009 the factoring companies that provided the statistics reported that they had lost 20,892 clients throughout the year and gained 15,100
20,892 lost clients is an extremely large percentage of the average number of clients overall and should give cause for concern to observers.
Barclays seem to be the biggest loser as their client numbers went from 4,967 at the end of 2008 to 3,723 at the end of 2009 which is a reduction of 25%