1pm, the Bath-based specialist lender to growing small and medium-sized firms, is predicting more rapid growth itself after securing another source of new finance.
The firm, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market, has negotiated a £14.5m increase in its block discounting facilities with six existing funding partners, taking the total to £62m.
The move comes just over two weeks after 1pm agreed a £35m facility with the British Business Bank (BBB).
As a result, the group now has access to £49.5m of additional funding and facilities totalling of £97m.
At the end of February, 1pm also announced access to international retail investor funding to augment its funding mix through the Mintos marketplace.
1pm said the additional funding would be used exclusively to write new business in the financing of asset and loan lending to UK SMEs.
Chief financial officer James Roberts said the new facilities reflected the group’s growing reputation in the industry as an ambitious and high-quality business.
“Taken as a whole our recent funding developments position us appropriately to meet the continuing demand for finance from UK SMEs and will underpin our strategy for growth in the group’s asset finance and loan finance divisions,” he said.
“Our partners’ desire to work with us has seen us move from numerous standalone smaller facilities tied to individual subsidiary entities to larger, more flexible, group-wide facilities. This enables us to move further towards consolidating an overall corporate treasury function and to benefit from the associated economies of scale as we continually look to reduce our cost of funding and increase our net interest margin.”
1pm has six trading subsidiaries operating from seven sites across the UK employing 158 staff and serving more than 16,000 small and medium-sized businesses.
The firm’s operations are organised into three product groups – asset finance including vehicles, loans and commercial finance.
In the six months to November 30 it increased pre-tax profits by 77% to £3.6m on revenue up 74% to £13.9m following a string of strategic acquisitions.
