The Pension Solutions Group

Turgid times for lending

Client background

• The clients’ company, like many companies, had some outstanding loans from the bank secured to company assets;
• The company Directors had pension funds that they’d accrued through various sources;
• The company had a need to launch an important new product.

The clients and their adviser weren’t hearing the right noises from their bank so they got in touch with us to see if they could help themselves through their accrued pension funds.

The challenge

With these turgid economic conditions, we know that most companies have been and still are experiencing trading difficulties of one sort or another, not least in terms of getting credit to keep things going.  The banks aren’t too keen to lend and when they do so it’s usually on quite different terms to those widely available a handful of years ago i.e. not good.  If you then add a maxed out overdraft facility to the problem, getting some extra credit from the bank to keep your company going is nigh on impossible.  A challenge indeed.

• The clients were experiencing trading difficulties and needed to pull their belt in;
• their company had invested in its new product but lacked the funds to meet the costs of a successful launch and the necessary marketing that goes with it;
• their company rented its business premises and therefore lacked the kind of security the bank was looking for to provide further lending;
• furthermore, the company’s overdraft facility was stretched to its limit;
• they needed cash but couldn’t see a way of obtaining it.

Our input

This isn’t exactly a unique situation. The names may change and the specific circumstances too, but it’s far from uncommon in these challenging financial times for a company to find itself in an approximation of this unfortunate scenario.

However, thanks to the insight of the clients’ Financial Adviser, we got the opportunity to review the background very thoroughly and sit down to explain how our products and services could be utilised to arrive at an outcome more positive than the clients dared believe.

The outcome

• We wiped out the company’s overdraft;
• we supplied ample funds to launch the new product;
• we reduced the company’s monthly outgoings;
• we consolidated the Directors’ pension funds;
• we provided the clients with a new scheme asset;

The magic bit

You should be thinking to yourself ‘this sounds good, I’d like to know more’, but this isn’t something we knocked out on a Friday afternoon.  So when we say revealed, we don’t mean in the way Penn and Teller used to show you how a trick was performed.  We’d love to tell you more about it, including all additional benefits of this process that we’ve not even hinted at here.  However, that’d be giving a little too much away at this stage.

Instead, if you have clients that can relate to these problems and you’d like to talk to us to find out how we helped these clients and how we could help you and your clients, we’d prefer to fill in the blanks at a meeting.