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One big story I haven’t commented on yet is the one that Paul Newey has reportedly sold the secured loans specialist, Ocean Finance, to American International Group (AIG).

The deal is said to have followed two years of talks between the organisations. Apparently Newey put Ocean up for sale in 2004, but no one would match the reported £250m price tag. Some reports say that MBNA, the US Credit Card Company, were once close to a deal, but later pulled out.

Ocean, which has a residential mortgage portfolio of £60m, made profits three years ago of about £27m on turnover of £65m but has yet to publish full accounts for this year.

Newey’s rise to fortune has been impressive, he co-founded Ocean in 1991 with a £2,500 investment after being made redundant from a financial services firm, then six years later he bought out his partner and now owns most of the company’s shares. The business specialises in secured loans, but also offers mortgages and re-mortgages.

Newey is also quite famous for reportedly winning £3million in a Birmingham casino, which is said to have contributed to Stanley Leisure issuing a profit warning that subsequently saw a sharp decline in their share price.

On this side of the pond, AIG is quite well known for its large shirt sponsorship deal with Manchester United.

The deal with AIG is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to complete in late 2006 or early 2007

Yipee! It’s Friday. Time to relax, drink a few firkins, cook a fry up and ponder what life will bring next week.

On the news front, I notice two key players have changed their product offerings.

Firstly DB Mortgages, part of the Deutsche Bank Group, have decided to ignore defaults across all product categories, opening up the criteria to more applicants in the Near Prime and to super light categories, an increase from £150 worth of CCJs to £500 for near prime.

Satisfied CCJs are now disregarded over 6 months old rather than 12 months for near prime to super light. All missed payments on secured loans in the same calendar month are treated as one missed payment, while there is a reduction in Bankruptcy and Individual Voluntary Arrangements requirements (IVAs) across all product categories. This all adds up to further signs that DB Mortgages are striving to become the key lender in the Sub Prime Market.

Another lender to change its offerings is the secured loans specialist Blemain. It’s introduced a new mortgage and secured loan shared ownership plan, with up to 60% of the clients share for a secured loan.

It’s also enhanced its valuation bypass scheme with increased LTVs and maximum loan amounts and says more cases can be funded without a valuation, improving conversion, speed of completion and saving costs.

It also says it now accepts Experian as well as Equifax searches.

Bestadvice reports that Fiscal Concepts, the Edgeware based Mortgage specialist, is to start packaging Secured Loans and Sub Prime Mortgages from next week.

Fiscal’s director of mortgage strategy, Ronnie Golding criticised some masterbrokers currently operating in the market saying there is a general lack of experience in the secured lending sector.

He said: “We currently deal with secured and unsecured loans. We discovered that we are better at the technical knowledge than the other people that we talk to. It’s amazing – we talk to underwriters and we have forgotten more than they know.

“There is no substitute for having done something for numerous years. We are looking to launch an apprenticeship scheme too. There are lots of graduates in the industry that haven’t got a clue about the real world. What happens in real life has nothing to do with a string of exams.”

Now I’m not one to openly criticise….let he who casts the first stone and all that…but I think Fiscal Concepts website needs a little bit of work. It looked like there were lots of things to click on to get details about the company, what they did etc. But when you dig into it there’s hardly any information there at all.

However, good look to them in their entry into the secured loans market