Touch Financial Support

It’s silly season otherwise known as annual awards time

by

Silly season is back again with annual awards being dished out to all and sundry. It seems that the same small handful of companies share the awards around each year with the exception of the NACFB award for factoring and invoice discounting which seems to be won by Bibby every year.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that they have a Bibby representative on the NACFB board. 🙂

The latest shortlist to be published is probably the daftest one yet as the Institute of Credit Management (ICM) in their infinite wisdom have accepted nominations from the following three companies for their Commercial Finance Provider of the Year award.

Market Invoice
Bank of Valletta
Touch Financial

Touch Financial is of course not a commercial finance provider at all but is a broking outfit with a hardworking self promotions department whilst the other two I guess were nominated by someone with a sense of humour.

The blurb accompanying the press release contained the following masterpiece

“The outstanding quality of entries received for these brand new awards was extremely high and a reflection of the great achievements made in the industry.

The glittering award ceremony will be held at the prestigious Hilton Park Lane Hotel in London, and will provide the winners of the first ever ICM British Credit Awards with exceptional recognition before some of the industry’s most influential people.”

The worst kept secret in the factoring world revealed

by

For quite a long time the Google rankings for that all important word “factoring” has been dominated by an obscure website factoring.org.uk which consisted of a few articles, no contact details and a contact form that no-one in their right mind would use not knowing where it would be ending up.

According to Nominet the domain was owned by an anonymous person in the home counties but I had a sneaking suspicion that there was more to this website than met the eye as the website was the recipient of inbound links from none other than my old friends Touch Financial Support with the word factoring on Touch’s inside pages being keyword linked to this anonymous site.

All has now been revealed as I had a call from a broking buddy today to tell me that the Nominet details had been changed and the domain name was now showing as owned by SFP Brokers LTD trading as Touch Financial.

It will be interesting to see what happens now as the website as it stands hardly inspires confidence but if it’s over developed like their main site it could end up suffering the same fate and being dumped into the boondocks by Google

Touch Financial Support | are they ethical or not

by

The website for Factoring Solutions has fortunately been on page one of Google for the last ten years but one of the downsides is that it makes me a target for others who would like to share in my success by fair means or foul.

A Google search for factoring solutions last week came up with a result in 11th place headed:-

Benefits Of Using Factoring Solutions | Touch Financial
Factoring Solutions – Over 40,000 business in the UK now use factoring and invoice discounting. Read more about how factoring could help your business grow, …

My website which has been online since 1999 currently starts off with “Factoring and invoice discounting is being used by over 41,000 companies UK wide” and what is more I have used similar phrasing since 2003

It would seem that Touch Financial Support have cleverly manipulated the meta tags on the website in what looks like an attempt to try and lure people there who are actually looking for my Factoring Solutions website

The H1 title on Touch Financial Support’s web page is headed “Benefits of using Factoring Solutions” and as the webbies reading this will know, Google attaches importance to the H1 titles.

Whatever Touch Financial may claim to the contrary “Benefits of using Factoring Solutions” is hardly correct grammatically and the upper case S in Solutions gives the game away anyway.

As if that wasn’t enough there are further references throughout the page as follows:-

The benefits of using Factoring solutions is that cash flow is assured

Businesses seeking Factoring solutions have two options

What’s the cost of using Factoring solutions?

Naturally, one of the key considerations when thinking about Factoring solutions is the amount it will cost

If you believe that Factoring solutions could be for you the next step could be to contact Touch Financial to compare quotes

In my mind there is no doubt what Touch Financial Support are trying to do and whilst it’s quite legal the question that I ask is whether it’s ethical or not.

I know that some of my competitors read this blog so if anyone from Cashflow UK is looking in you might want to have a look at  www dot touchfinancial.co.uk/knowledge-centre/guides/factoring/factoring-uk as they have tried the same trick on you with this page deliberately designed to try and lure people searching for Factoring UK as your company used to be called.

I did contact Touch Financial Support asking them if they were finding these tactics fruitful but apart from a standard email thanking me for contacting them they didn’t bother to respond further.