GLI Finance posts £16.5m loss after “difficult” 2016
ALTERNATIVE finance investment firm GLI Finance has reported a loss of £16.5m for 2016 following a “difficult year” for the group.
Much of the decline was attributed to goodwill write downs and operating losses at the firm’s peer-to-peer lending businesses Sancus Finance and Funding Knight.
The London-quoted company, which invests in a range of alternative finance providers, launched a strategic review last year following a £6.5m loss for 2015 that saw it sell assets, write down several investments and split the business into two parts.
One part is Sancus BMS, which includes invoice P2P finance platform Sancus Finance. The other is FinTech Ventures, which encompasses the wholly owned Funding Knight and companies GLI has a stake in such as UK Bond Network.
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Over the year, transactions on Sancus Finance, rebranded from Platform Black during 2016, increased by 65 per cent, the report said. The P2P lender has now arranged the funding of £105m of invoices.
Andrew Whelan (pictured), chief executive of GLI Finance, said the company had entered 2017 in better shape.
“There is more work to do, and we are focusing on improving the performance of Sancus Finance and Funding Knight, as well as supporting our platforms,” he said.
“There is a strong sense of momentum in the business and staff are excited to meet the targets we have set and the challenges that we will inevitably face.
“This annual report marks the final stage of GLI’s transformation from an ‘investment trust,’ the performance of which was measured on changes in the fair value of its net asset value per share, to a group comprising two distinct businesses.”