Welcome finance going under?

neo_tintin

Hi
i have a car loan with welcome finance and 2 of my local branches have closed.
they have also stopped lending to new and old customers it also says this on there website
"Welcome Finance is no longer taking new applications for personal and secured loans."

does this mean they are going under? if so what happens to outstanding loans?

[Deleted User]

they`ll be totally forgotten about and you will no longer owe them your soul.......sigh

dotstar24

i hope they are! but this doesn't mean any debts will be written off. they will be sold on to some company somewhere....spose you could ask for a copy of your CCA if you fancy your chances???

neo_tintin

dotstar but does that mean the ppl that buy the debt would own my car? would they ave any right to take my vehicle?

Tixy

If they went under totally (and bearing in mind this has been supposedly going to happen for many months now) then its likely that another company (or lots of companies) would buy the assets, including your car and the debt you owe on it. Which would most likely mean that all rights would pass to the new owner.
More likely is that it will very gradually get broken up and debts sold off in small packages until the company is left with none and will then be wound up.

Welcome finance were open to people making reduced full & final settlement offers recently. If you were in a financial position to do so you could consider making them an offer to pay off the loan so you own your car yourself.

industryinsider2

Poor old Welcome Finance. This is one of my favourite stories of the past couple of years.

Welcome made a surprise announcement to their introducer network halfway through December 2008, stating that they were temporarily closing their doors to new business. They started accepting leads again in January 2009 but closed for good in the February.

It was fairly well known in the industry that Welcome branches were refinancing bad loans so that they didn't show up on their bad debt statistics and branch managers could achieve their bonuses. So where borrowers had gone into arrears, as long as they came into branch to beg for merci they were allowed to take a new loan for the outstanding loan which rolled the outstanding balance, interest, PPI and any charges into a nice neat new loan that even if the borrower failed to make any repayments, wouldn't show up on branch arrears statistics for at least three months. There were also rumours that the less scrupulous branches were throwing caution to the wind and simply refinancing bad loans into new agreements without borrowers signing a new credit agreement - although how widespread this practise was I don't know.

You can imagine that after 5 or 10 years this got pretty bad and in real terms by the time the company actually closed, the loan book was about 64% in arrears. Now the company is in run off pretty much to collect out the book and repay whatever they can to the institutional funders who'd backed them to the tune of around £2billion, high profile investors the like of every notable pension fund and high street bank in the UK. RBS had a particularly large exposure. Most of the former directors have fled the country for fear of criminal prosecution.

The bad news for neo_tintin is that the loans are still enforceable (unless you've got one of those dodgy ones that they wrote without your consent - check your credit file for a prematurely closed account and a new one for a sum that you don't recognise). Welcome cant go bankrupt because their investors wont let them, so if you don't want to lose your car or have them destroy your credit file - keep making those repayments. :money:

KingElvis

No easy way out from Welcome, they basically own your soul and your banger for life.........

mcs1977

KingElvis wrote: »

No easy way out from Welcome, they basically own your soul and your banger for life.........

Yup there is, pay them always and ontime :0)
only 9 payments left for me lol

fozmcfc

mcs1977 wrote: »

Yup there is, pay them always and ontime :0)
only 9 payments left for me lol

A breath of fresh air, amongst the many I've failed to keep up repayments, I don't want to pay, I'm trying to squirm out of my obligations type posts.

A big :money:from me.

Rosie111

All paid up too thankfully, just waiting to hear back about the PPI reclaimimg now!!

KingElvis

mcs1977 wrote: »

Yup there is, pay them always and ontime :0)
only 9 payments left for me lol

They'll find something, some £25 charge from four years ago or something which has now matured into £625555 + VAT

I'm just kidding, it must be nice to see the light at the end of The Welcome Tunnel.

Excellent.