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It’s difficult to know what to make of market speculation, but the story doing the rounds at the end of last week was that Barclays is a takeover target of the Bank of America.

If this is true then it seems very strange that the Barclays Chairman, Matt Barrett, sold £6.5 million worth of shares last week. People also speculate that the two organisations would be a good fit. Bank of America recently bought MBNA the credit card company and whilst there would be obvious synergies, I’m unsure if Barclaycard wants or needs a merger with another credit card outfit.

Another story doing the rounds in the Sunday newspapers is that Egg, the Internet bank, is the target of another American Financial Giant Citigroup. The Prudential has talked down the offer as speculative this morning and has said it wants to concentrate on fully integrating Egg into its own operations. Despite having 3.5 million customers and an impressive 6% share of the credit card market, Egg still makes large losses.

Going back to Barclays, one shock piece of news last week was that Jeremy Masding the Chief Executive of the Secured Loans wing Firstplus has stepped down.

A Barclays spokesperson said: “Jeremy Masding has decided to step down from his role at FirstPlus to pursue opportunities outside the Barclays Group. Jeremy has made a fantastic contribution to Barclays, Barclaycard and FirstPlus during his 22 years with us. We wish him all the best.”

Masding is oft reported to having been doing well with Firstplus and the group was voted the 12th best place to work in a Sunday Times opinion poll. For what its worth 83% of his staff said his was doing a good job in the same poll.

Compass Finance reported today and three things from its results strike me as odd or questionable.

The first thing is, it reported turnover down from £14.3million to £12.9million and said “The Secured Loans market saw a significant downturn as a combination of higher interest rates and nervousness surrounding house price inflation resulted in a stalling effect”.

Now this strikes me as strange because not one other listed Secured Loans Company has reported a downturn. If we look at their last reports, we see Debts.co.uk reporting an impressive increase in sales and, although they don’t isolate the Secured Loans segment, they also don’t report market problems. We see Debtmatters, although only recently gaining its Secured Loans presence through the acquisition of Loanmakers, reporting no problems and Elephant, who haven’t reported since June, but in October still had the market confidence to refer to themselves as a “fast growing packager of loans”.

The second thing that strikes me as concerning is that Compass says “Following the acquisition of Budsworth & Co, the strategic business model for the Group is now complete, a great step forward for the business. The addition of IVA as a debt solution to sit at the forefront of our product range”.

The striking word here is “forefront”. If we look at the segmental analysis we see that IVAs currently make up 2.5% of sales, so it strikes me as odd that, presumably, Compass will put more resource into growing its IVA business rather than trying to sort out its, what on the face of it looks like a failing, Secured Loans business. I get the feeling Compass is merely reacting to other organisations financial results and the market growth in IVAs and merrily, but maybe blindly, jumping on the bandwagon.

The third thing I find questionable is Compass is going to rename itself ‘The Debt Advisor Group’. Now Compass isn’t the only one I consider at fault for doing this, but I find it misleading to end customers when organisations call themselves names like this. A slight exaggeration, but perhaps its like calling yourself a Doctor just because you advise people on cuts and bruises and profit from them buying band-aids and bandages.

Following in the growing trend of the retail and non-financial service sectors acting as secured loans introducers, Harvey World Travel is going to start offering secured loans in its shops.

Harvey World, an Australian based group of travel agents, has signed a deal with Promise Finance to offer secured loans and mortgages in its UK stores. Harvey World Travel, who also has a large franchise network, began expansion into the UK in 2004 and in 2005 bought 22 shops from the Wardle Group. The loans will be offered for any purpose and not just holidays.

Harvey World will begin the roll out of the new offerings in some of its larger travel agents in the early part of next year.

Promise Finance has said this is the first of a number of strategic alliances it will be launching in the next six months.

This news follows a remarkable increase in the number of entities now acting as introducers for secured loans. In recent years, companies like the AA, RAC, Sainsburys, Tesco and Asda have signed introducer agreements and offer secured loans branded under their own names.

With the fact that people regularly book their holidays months in advance allied to the comparatively short turn around time for secured loans, this new channel will probably work for Promise.

The main problem I have with it is when advice about a holiday gets mixed and mingled with advice about a financial transaction. In the models mentioned above, the Supermarkets and Breakdown Service companies have no ‘one to one’ interaction with the client and the loans are promoted textually in leaflets and websites.

This new type of sales channel might cause some questions to be asked.