Member Info for Jinny122

Provident will be watching closely, a top priority of theirs is expanding into unsecured personal loans.

If Provi can refinance at a lower interest rate or even at zero (if using internal resources) Everyday Loans could generate around £20m pre tax profit each year. imo If Provi then invest and grow loan book and store footprint, this could be a hugely valuable business

This week's RNS said trading in line with expectations. Depends what those are.

Likely to be standard template £150m loss, no loan book growth, marginally lower deposits, wafer thin MREL buffer, pinning all hopes on base rate rises and hoping to be put out of its suffering

...here is that the turnaround plan on Metro has been too meek to meet the demands of the challenge. Almost all other established banks (supposedly slow lumbering giants) have out-paced Metro on transformation actions.

Stand out worst performing banking stock over last 2 years has been Metro by a huge margin.

Needs bold action. What happened to the £3billion received from Natwest over 12 months ago???... Nothing, just sat there earning zilch

Could overshadow all else if not decided asap one way or other. Investors will care much less about Xmas trading results, focus now on any imminent take private possibility & strategy change.

Looks to be more than press speculation, comments are frm chairman & Ceo. Also calling into question previous announced strategy on splitting the various businesses.

Any views on this?

Another point to add is that if they raise £50m as some analysts are modelling, then thats a call of 16p for each currrent share held.

So a 6p per share share price now may need another 16p per share in out-of-pocket top up just to escape wipeout from dilution

.....HUGE mistake removing VH and CD from the board. They were the two founding members with the vision and belief in the business and its USP which was bought into by the early investors.

Current strategy appears to view Metro as a mistake that needs correcting. With a best case outcome of being the new Co-Op bank.

..... they took too long (9 months+), and now the entire sector is under a cloud. Terrible timing

The £700m disposal proceeds is actually £300m from ESS (already sold, cash just received) and £400m new disposals, of which £200m is expected this year

Great performance on that front...

Marlog, tend to agree with your assessment. The value in owning NSF is obvious.

But, cant see Marathon (day 1 investors at 100p) sitting back and letting this go to Alchemy (relatively recent entrants at around 35p).

At same time, cant see much appetite from other investors for injecting additional tens of millions of pounds just to stand still and avoid dilution.

Where is everyone getting March 5th results date from? The company have not scheduled or announced any update yet.

More interestingly will be why that is

Loooooong way to go to salvage this, been in the red since Jan 2018.

Fingers crossed

BoBets

Are you a fan of the ''turnaround'' strategy?

Effectively fire selling valuable assets to fund current and future losses & a failed turnaround plan that has already consumed £2.3Billion cash with little trace. Yet the business is at its weakest position in a decades

... You could weep.

Capita has been badly damaged imo by the so called turnaround strategy. A shadow of its former self.

Such a shame.

Even after a potential rights issue (if it happens), Alchemy (current around 35p avg.) are likely to still be deep underwater on breakeven. Theres no guarantee the SP will not get shorted / traded back to below rights issue price, further increasing their losses.

RI idea was may have been a knee jerk response to first lockdown from March to June/July. They have had 7 more months to re-assess and see how business is doing. Sales and cash held up very well at last announcement. None of their rivals are having to raise equity either.

Theosus.

PFG would be a good suitor but it may not get regulatory approval as it will monopolise the sector. Provident are already the dominant players by far.

Maybe one of the smaller players like Morses Club or Non Standard Finance are better suitors. That way competition is enhanced as they will go head to head with Provident when scaling up

Or maybe the mortgage sale to NatWest was in response to aregulator unhappy at the breach of minimum MREL reserves. Was interesting how Metro was clear to state the sale remedied its MREL breach backdated to September 2020.

Metro's strategy is exciting atm, taking higher risk for much higher rewards. Thumbs up, thats the true definition of a serious challenger/community bank imo.

Metro now needs to make a major acquisition in the Home collected loans sector which has high loan yields or maybe also look at starting up a competitor to Vanquis Bank's highly profitable credit card business

Jcx1987, good find.

Customer Management generated around £850m sales in 2019, and operating profit of £55m.

It seems Capita is being broken up and sold piecemeal

Of the hundreds of billions spent on covid response and contract awards, has Capita won any meaningful contracts?

Has it won any meaninful contracts in the private sector in the last 12 months? Or is it largely reliant on public sector contracts?

Can recall that the supposed turnaround strategy originally involved moving away from public sector work in pursuit of higher margin private sector ones. This seems to be another failed plan