15 November 2022
Morses Club PLC
Update on Peak Advance Funding
Morses Club PLC ("Morses Club", the "Company" or, together with its subsidiary undertakings, the "Group"), an established provider of non-standard credit services, provides the following update on its funding provision.
The Group's current facility of £25m remains in place until 31 March 2023, supported by the present two funder consortium. The funders have continued to grant a deferral of the testing of two covenants, and there has been no breach of the covenants to date. Furthermore, as previously announced, the term-out clause has been extended until January 2023.
The funders have subsequently confirmed that they have decided not to provide a peak trading advance against the Morses Club loan book for the period from 15 November 2022 to 14 February 2023. As a consequence, the Company will take steps to constrain lending in both the HCC and digital divisions accordingly.
This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of the Market Abuse Regulation (EU) 596/2014. The person responsible for this announcement is Graeme Campbell, Chief Financial Officer.
For further information please contact:
Morses Club PLC | Tel: +44 (0) 330 045 0719 |
Peel Hunt (Nominated Adviser) | Tel: +44 (0) 20 7418 8900 |
Camarco | Tel: +44 (0) 20 3757 4994 |
Notes to Editors
About Morses Club
Morses Club is an established provider of non-standard credit services in the UK. The Group consists of Morses Club, the UK's largest home collected credit ("HCC") provider1, and Shelby Finance Limited, Morses Club's Digital division, which operates under the online brand of Dot Dot Loans, an online lending provider. The Group's growing Digital capabilities and scalable, highly invested IT platform has enabled Morses Club to deliver a range of lending products to the non-standard credit market.
UK HCC is considered to be a specialised segment of the broader UK non-standard credit market. UK HCC loans are typically small, unsecured loans delivered directly to customers either remotely or in their homes.
Morses Club's HCC division is the largest UK Home Collected Credit (HCC) lender1 with 143,000 customers throughout the UK. The HCC division enjoys consistently high customer satisfaction scores of 97%2. In 2019 the Company introduced an online customer portal for its HCC customers, used by 81% of customers.
The Group's growing Digital division, Shelby Finance, operates under the online brand Dot Dot Loans which provides online instalment loans of up to 48 months to c. 39,000 active customers.
Morses Club listed on AIM in May 2016.
About the UK non-standard credit market
The UK non-standard credit market, of which UK HCC is a subset, consists of both secured and unsecured lending and is estimated to comprise around 10 million consumers3 and total loan receivables of £9.6bn4.
Non-standard credit is the provision of secured and unsecured credit to consumers other than through mainstream lenders. Lenders providing non-standard credit principally lend on an unsecured basis and the market is characterised by high frequency borrowing. Approximately 2 million people move annually between standard and non-standard markets 4.
Since February 2014, unsecured personal lending has grown from £161 billion to £225 billion in February 2020. It has since contracted to £197 billion in August 20215.
1 Based on Net Loan Book of £45.3m as at 28 August 2021
2 Independent Customer Satisfaction Survey conducted by Mustard
3 FCA High Cost Credit Review Technical Annex 1: CRA data analysis of UK personal debt - July 2017
4 Apex Insight - Non-Prime Consumer Credit: UK Market Insight Report - December 2020
5 Table A5.2, Bank of England Money and Credit Bank stats August 2021
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