We started this business 14 years ago as Hampshire Trust Factors, a subsidiary of a private bank.  My mission (do people still use that word?) was to set up a business with an emphasis on service and in addition to funding, providing a decent credit control job for our clients.  I felt that as an industry the credit control aspect of what we do was only given lip service and I saw some horror stories in that regard.  The printing company with a £500k ledger and £250k over 90 days springs to mind, credit control managed (or completely ignored) by a big bank factoring company.<

I have just received the 2011 Industry Review from ‘Business Money’ which always makes interesting reading.  

 
The Banks

The biggest player in the market is RBS with a 24% market share by client advances.  Despite its problems and the burden of the name, they still produced a 5% increase in advances.

Second come Lloyds and then Barclays and HSBC.  The combined market share of the Bank subsidiary Invoice Finance lenders is a huge 78%, which emphasises their dominance in the market.  

"Most of the Linux 2.6 and 3.x kernels include a name in the Makefile of their source trees, which can be found in the git repository.”

I came across this on Wikipedia the other day; don’t ask what I was looking for.

An analysis of the ABFA statistics for 2011 shows them to be the usual curate’s egg.  The positives are that client sales are up on last year (9%) although with little increase in factoring and the bulk of the increase in Invoice Discounting (11%).  Advances to clients were also up by 7% on the previous year with the total now approaching £16bn.

However overall client numbers were static and factoring numbers actual fell by a few hundred. 

There was a time when we would go for months without losing a client through them either leaving or failing.   We are very proud of the fact that in 13 years we have never lost a client through lack of service.  Alas, times have changed and client leavers have become a much more familiar experience for us.  Looking back over the last few months this is for a number of reasons, the last 6 are:

Shakespeare’s line related to a particular romantic conflict, but is it right?  Does a name matter?   Would you be more likely to buy a rose named ‘Fragrant Dew’ to one called ‘Nick Clegg’.

The Asset Based Finance Association or ABFA is the trade association representing the Invoice Finance industry.