Legion Commerce Finance – a commerce finance supplier – has gone into administration.
Legion Commerce Finance offered amenities to UK corporations with a purpose to enable them to buy items from suppliers world wide. These amenities began at £100k in dimension, with no higher restrict. The corporate appointed Begbies Traynor as directors on 9 June 2016, based on a Corporations Home submitting. The corporate’s LinkedIn web page means that it had 11-50 staff. Legion was not a peer-to-peer lender, in that it was not open to retail buyers.
When SME lending specialist GLI Finance launched its closed finish fund – GLI Various Finance – in September 2015, Legion represented the second largest publicity inside what was initially a £40.27m portfolio. The fund had £5.1m invested by means of the commerce finance supplier. That publicity was topped solely by the £14.6m that was invested by means of FundingKnight – which additionally appointed directors in late June, earlier than being acquired out of administration by GLI.
A spokesperson for GLI Finance confirmed that GLI has by no means held fairness in Legion Commerce Finance. That very same spokesperson acknowledged that the scenario at Legion has no monetary implications for GLI Finance in anyway, whereas a separate spokesperson mentioned that there aren’t any monetary implications for the GLI Various Finance fund both.
Anecdotally, our understanding is {that a} vital consider FundingKnight’s demise was an overreliance on GLI for mortgage capital. When former GLI boss Geoff Miller stop in December of final yr, the brand new administration crew – led by Andy Whelan – dedicated to refocusing the corporate’s actions on a narrower crop of worthwhile lenders. GLI stopped lending cash by means of the FundingKnight platform in February, prompting FundingKnight to advise its buyers to count on “a short-term discount in loans being supplied on the platform”. FundingKnight then clearly struggled to seek out recent mortgage capital, in the end resulting in the GLI takeover in June. Whereas troublesome to substantiate, it might seem {that a} related set of circumstances set Legion on the street to administration.