The ABFA have issued a very positive press release about the industry statistics for the first 6 months of 2011 and the headline figures look good, but what about the detail?  Are the figures as impressive as ABFA suggest?

Clients’ sales

Domestic factoring: 

No change at all on first quarter and only 2% change on this time last year.  Not a lot of growth in factoring then.

Invoice Discounting:

15% growth in the quarter and on this time last year.  So the growth in coming from ID facilities. But not necessarily from new clients (see below).

Advances

14% increase on Invoice Finance advances from this time last year.  That’s impressive.
Debtors have increased 8% so the industry is lending more against its security.  More positive news.

Client Numbers

Factoring clients DOWN 5%.   So not only are we not growing our factoring books we are also losing more clients in this sector and doing larger deals.  Not really surprising as many small factoring clients cease and we are probably converting some larger ID clients to factoring.

ID client numbers up only 3%.  The 15% growth in client sales for ID is not reflected in new clients, so the growth is coming largely from existing clients and we are lending more to existing clients.

Export

The good news is that export lending is up and export client numbers are also up.  So we are taking on new export clients.

Clearly this is a quick and simplistic analysis.  I would be interested in ABFA members’ interpretation of these statistics.