With the warm feelings that come from Christmas cheer and a large
advocaat snowball I shall sit back and reflect on 2007 and sum it
up from a broker’s perspective.
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The biggest event of the year for me was the sad loss of my best
friend, confidant and advisor – my mum, who has been the biggest
supporter of mine and will be dreadfully missed. Surprisingly,
given the personal challenges of this year, business has been up,
as it has been for many brokers. In my case the increase has
exceeded 40 per cent even after one of the worst first quarters
ever. Consistency is not a word that we can apply to vehicle
finance broking these days – sales vary dramatically from month to
month, making it hard for us poor souls to plan holidays and even
long weekends. And there are no indications that this situation
will improve in the coming year (but more of that in a
moment).
We saw the sad loss of Dixons who had their own finance brokerage
operation for years providing small brokers with some great money
making deals before it became absorbed into Lombard. We have also
seen the loss of another great supporter of brokers, Bank of
Scotland Vehicle Finance, which has been absorbed into the now
completely Halifax-owned Lex and Capital Bank. Even though BoS
didn’t quite understand the meaning or use of emails, their quaint
olde worlde ways gave some of us older brokers a warm feeling that
you were dealing with proper people. They will be sadly missed and
I wish their staff who have either moved across, left or are about
to leave the very best of luck and a big thank you for all their
help over the years.
Captive clawback
This year has seen the continued rise of manufacturers’ finance,
providing dealers with rates to compete with the big players in the
market place, but this has not helped the cause as brokers start to
use rates provided by tame dealers rather than their own computer
systems and rely on the dealership staff being able to firstly
create then to interpret a contract hire quote – very risky
business. Don’t get me wrong, there are some very competent dealers
out there, but there are also some complete doughnuts that are
misselling the products all over the place. Maybe the initiative by
the FLA to train dealership staff is a good move.
Well to sum up, a successful year for most of us with few
casualties that I am aware of. As for 2008, we are already seeing a
credit squeeze with underwriting getting tougher and rates starting
to reflect a downturn in trading conditions. Whilst I am continuing
to plan for growth I can see that this coming year will be tougher.
What we need is more and varied products to reflect the trading
conditions. What happened to creativity? A happy Christmas and
prosperous New Year to my loyal group of readers.
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By GlobalDataGraham Hill, chief executive, Graham Hill Automotive Finance
