Gary Jennison will turn this around5 Nov 2020 08:53
The new CEO, who was appointed last month after the board had a “a divergence of views” with its intended new boss, said he had “successfully turned around three financial services businesses in my career, and I am determined to make this number four”.
He said the guarantor lending company is “full of good people at all levels and we are working hard to fix the complaints, fix the relationship with the regulator, and get Amigo lending again”.
Earlier this year the company made an agreement with the Financial Conduct Authority to resolve a backlog of complaints from borrowers while the financial watchdog completes an investigation into the company, which remains ongoing.
Bournemouth-based Amigo's latest results showed that £116mln had been set aside for the potential costs of dealing with the surge in complaints, while bad debt charges rose to £18.5mln, or 37.9% of revenues.
Jennison said in his open letter that where a customer has a valid complaint and we have done something wrong, “we are going to do the right thing for the customer and put it right. There are undoubtably [sic] cases where we have done the wrong thing, but a significant number of the claims that we are getting are not genuine claims.”
He added that he “had a good relationship with the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulatory Authority in my previous roles.
“I am going to spend my time building relationships with the key people in the regulator; to discuss my plans and to get their help to make sure what we're planning to do is in line with what they want us to do.”
He said he has already seen at Amigo “a lot of evidence that we do things properly” and that it can help large the section of the UK population who are “very badly served by the mainstream banks and is misunderstood”.
Shares in the company were up 7% to 10.94p on Monday morning, where they are down 84% since the start of the year.
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