Tag Archives: German Market

Weekly digest

The week completed, 5th December 2014

JMS

Another busy week of phone calls and a couple of trips to Birmingham, including the increasingly crowded German Market.

Currently compiling a number of reports for peer to peer facilities and this type of funding really is gaining popularity with competitively priced, quickly implemented, facilities offering real options.

As and when interest rates go up so the peer to peer lending market will be tested as investors may return to more conventional places for their funds.

The Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA) revealed industry statistics for 2014 Q3 revealing their members clients  were using £19.3bn of funding as compared to £17.2bn a year earlier. The vast majority of this funding is against outstanding invoices with just over 5% attributable to other business assets (stock, plant, machinery, property, etc)

The physical number of clients remains pretty static with 43708 recorded clients amongst ABFA members. At the end of 2004 there were just under 40000 clients so client numbers have grown less than 10% in the last 10 years. This suggests the increase in funding is attributable to much larger clients and smaller possible clients are not being attracted to debtor based facilities.

Marketing calls come to an end soon;  once Christmas parties kick in is the general rule as businesses use Christmas as a reason to defer any decision. The venue for the FactoringPartners Christmas Party has not yet been determined!

Weekly digest

The week completed, 28th November 2014

JMS

The busiest week since Factoring Partners began trading again in earnest in September. Over 100 invoice finance clients have been spoken to as part of an exercise to gauge levels of client satisfaction.

Over 75% of those spoken to who offered an opinion expressed partial to complete satisfaction with their existing facility, both in terms of working capital released by the facility and suitability of the service received.

The balance were either indifferent to the facility received, unwilling to pass any comment or expressed outright concern as to the suitability of their current facility. This latter group is where an experienced, independent broker should be able to assist and hopefully wheels are in motion for this to happen.

We have also spoken to some larger SME’s (£25m t/o pa & larger) about supplier finance and the availability of such facilities, enabling them to standardise and extend terms under which they purchase without penalising the supplier chain. Buyers benefit from extending terms given obvious cash benefits and suppliers can benefit too. Recently this area has been the banks territory offering supplier finance agreements, largely, to investment grade buyers. Smaller, well rated (credit) businesses now also have access to this market.

A networking trip to Birmingham involved the annual visit to the now famous German Market which seemed busier than ever. Back next week.