Mr. Rutter: The business was formed in July 1999. We started trading on 26th October 1999; and we floated the business on 4th August 2000. The business provides small to medium-sized business with factoring and invoice discounting, which is basically lending money against unpaid invoices. The normal modus operandi is that they raise an invoice, we provide them with 80% against the gross value of the invoice, when their customer pays they receive the 20% back. There are two charges for this: there's obviously the interest rate for the amount of money and the amount of time that we lend them the money - it's all on a rolling basis; money comes in, money goes out - and then there's a turnover charge. The interest rate ranges between 2%-4% over the Bank of Scotland base rate; and the turnover charge rate is from 0.5%-3.5% of gross turnover.
TWST: Is your focus exclusively within the UK, or have you European
operations?
Mr. Rutter: At the moment we've set our stall out to all the
institutions for the foreseeable future, we will be a one-site operation
in the UK. A number of our competitors, including Euro Sales, have gone
multi-site, which we are not going to do. We will have one site based at
Brentwood, which is going to be the operation site and head office.
We'll have IT-literate salesman dotted around the country so you get the
benefit of the presence of those salesmen in a small local area; and you
have the benefit of good communications in a one-site operation,
therefore you don't duplicate lots of costs. We believe we can actually
run many more clients on much less staff than our competitors and
provide a better level of service.
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