Nicola Horlick defends Money&Co’s financial performance
MONEY&CO – founded by City superwoman Nicola Horlick – has hit out at mainstream media coverage of the peer-to-peer business lending platform’s financial health.
Coverage of the lender’s latest accounts for the year to March 2018 over the weekend focused on the business having a retained earnings deficit of £8.6m and that its headcount had been cut from 12 people to one person.
But these figures only concentrated on small company accounts filed by Denmark Square Limited – one of the parent companies of Money&Co – which runs the platform in a joint venture with Bramdean Asset Management.
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“We made a loss of £1.5m pre-tax in the year to March 2018,” Horlick (pictured), chief executive of Money&Co, told Peer2Peer Finance News.
“However, £1.2m of this related to the television and newspaper marketing campaign that we undertook at the end of March 2018.
“Because of the timing of the campaign, all of the cost went into 2017/18 and not much of the revenue that resulted from it.
“If you treat this an exceptional item, then the trading loss was £300,000 in 2017/18 against a trading loss of £1.18m the previous year.”
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She said the platform has been trading at breakeven in the current financial year and said it may make a profit for the year to end March 2019.
“We are forecasting a substantial profit in the year to March 2020,” she said.
Horlick added that there are currently 15 people working full-time on Money&Co products either through Denmark Square Limited, Bramdean Asset Management LLP or through the distribution joint venture and there are two part-time.
“Some mainstream media has betrayed a woeful lack of understanding not just of financial technology, but of the way that start-ups in general actually work,” a spokesman for the platform added.
“It’s pointless to speculate as to why there’s such a consistent desire in some quarters to dress up good news as bad.”
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