We Introduce You

This morning Debmatters, who recently reported a good set of interims, announced a boardroom change. Jonathan Timmis joins on January 2 as Technical Director on the Operations Board.

Jonathan is a licensed insolvency practitioner and has held several positions within the industry including roles at Lathams as well as Ratcliffe & Co.

Ges Ratcliffe, the Debtmatters CEO, has previous experience of working with Timmis at Ratcliffe and Co., which was a predecessor to Debtmatters.

In this mornings announcement Debmatters say, “Jonathan, who joins from his own successful Lancaster based practice, which he founded in 1999, will bring with him a portfolio of cases as well five experienced members of staff who will join Debtmatters’ Corporate and Commercial Division.”

So it appears on the face of it, Timmis must be getting more out of the deal than merely a place on the board.

Debmatters entered the Secured Loans market through its purchase of Loanmakers in June and hopes to grow the cross referral of IVAs and secured loans between the two businesses.

In another change, Elephant Loans and Mortgages, who reported yesterday, announced the appointment of Maria Giambrione as Company Secretary. Elephant say Maria will be responsible for the accounts and administrative functions of the Group.

She replaces, David Gammond, who recently worked on the IVA operating subsidiary DebtSmashers, and has handed over his executive responsibilities but will be responsible on a non-executive basis for overseeing corporate strategy and specific projects.

Elephant Loans and Mortgages (ELEP) has reported its Interims this morning and from a first glance it looks like they are putting everything in place for future growth.

Elephant is a packager of Secured Loans and mortgages and following in the ever-growing trend is launching an IVA division called Debtsmashers.

Again, contrary to the problems reported by Compass, Elephant reports a 29% growth in commission income and a 75% increase in the number of agreements packaged for onward lenders.

Despite turnover going up, the group has made a substantial loss brought about by a dramatic increase in administration expenses (800k up to 1.5m). Elephant points out this is due to opening a further four branches, bringing its total number to seven, and recruiting additional staff.

Elephant feels that having direct to customer branches improves conversion rates and, to be honest, it will have to improve it significantly to cover the overheads and staff costs. It seems a strange strategy for Elephant to take on the big boys with a branch network and I guess only time will tell if they can pull it off.

Elephant says it has also signed up more affiliate partners and improved its commission rates with lenders. In October it raised nearly £1million with a share placing and says this will be spent on growing Debtsmashers.

Elephant was only admitted to Aim late last year and I’d rate it has a reasonably high risk share.

The Regulatory Alliance of Mortgage Packagers (RAMP) is to form a new industry-wide compliance forum.

The new forum, which is aiming to have 12 delegates, is designed to better represent the differing views of all the mortgage industry. It is envisaged that the new group will comprise of four lenders, one packaging alliance (RAMP), two independent packagers, three directly authorised intermediaries and two networks

The new voice piece will be called The Mortgage Compliance Forum and its main purpose will be to engage the FSA and share views before policy decisions are made.

The FSA has said that it wants better industry cooperation, but the problem here is that although the new group will go some way to appeasing the regulator, there is still going to be a disjointed industry because of the number of rival groups to RAMP.

Correct me if I am wrong, but a quick glance around the Internet reveals there are the Professional Mortgage Packagers Alliance (PMPA), the Alliance of Mortgage Packagers and Distributors (AMPD) and the United Packagers Association (UPA) all doing a similar pre forum thing to RAMP and surely they will already have similar plans or their own ideas about compliance.

By either using a Boxing Association or Judean Peoples Front analogy, there just seems to be too many groups.