Spotlight on specialist finance
James Fletcher is the Managing Director of Close Brothers Broker Solutions’ Specialist Finance team, which operates in large ticket transactions typically between £1 million to £15 million.
For anyone unfamiliar with our team and what we do – and I know there will be many - the Specialist Finance team occupies an interesting niche in Close Brothers for a few reasons: the size of our typical transactions; the broad spectrum of businesses and sectors we can service, and the complexity of the deals we can transact.
We are able to look at a transaction from an asset, covenant or structured perspective, which means that even if we don’t have enough asset security or a strong enough covenant, there is still potential to structure a deal with multiple exits to achieve a solution that works for all.
Market outlook
Despite the recent macroeconomic challenges, our area of the asset finance market remains buoyant thanks largely to our long-term partnerships with a range of expert introducers. This has allowed us to grow our sales team, which gives us the bandwidth to proactively seek additional introducers to fuel our growth.
This could be through new introducers to Close Brothers or via our Broker Solutions business, which undertakes sub £1 million transactions, and where those brokers may also have larger opportunities that Specialist Finance can assist with.
Our loan book portfolio continues to grow strongly, and we have actively enhanced our in-life management capability. Together with the introducing broker, we now meet our customers on an annual basis, which is proving to be very useful in both relationship development and to ensure everything is going well for them.
Independent research we commissioned has confirmed brokers value good customer service over everything else, which remains a key focus area for us.
Specialist areas
Over time, due to the nature of our transactions, we have developed specialist areas of expertise, and we continue to plan for growth in these sectors. One example is high net worth customers who ask us to fund their prestige cars and car collections. As a self-confessed car nut, it’s exciting and interesting to see these collections and get an understanding of the people behind them.
We have in the past year brought four introducer facing businesses together under the Broker Solutions brand, including Specialist Finance, Business Solutions, Braemar Finance and Corporate Asset Solutions. The aim of doing this is to ensure our proposition is wide in scope and easy to access for our introducers.
The availability of lending, products and services are subject to eligibility, status and our lending criteria. The right to decline any application is reserved, terms and conditions apply.
