Indivudual small claims or combined

HeatonGuy

Just looked at the website:

As an award-winning legal recovery firm, we develop robust strategies for every volume debt purchase / financial services project we undertake.

Seems clear they are purchasing the debts themselves.

System

Seems clear they are purchasing the debts themselves

We'll have to disagree on that.

The original reference was to here (http://www.bwlegal.com/wordpress/who-we-work-with/debt-purchase/) and you'll notice they make two statements

We have vast experience in supporting major debt purchasers


We can offer a ‘champion challenge’ where all of our costs are contingent on achieving better results

This is a traditional ambulance chasing organisation working on a no-win/no-fee "conditional" basis - called CFA. They have had a fund raising exercise a couple of years ago but this was to hire staff and not to fund debt purchase.

The other point about CFA's is that they are normally insurance backed but the risk level on this sort of debt is so low they don't appear to have this cover but instead self-insure - taking on the risk themselves.

Where this happens the performance ratios are key in that the funders (as opposed to the insurance backers) want to know success ratios on a monthly basis as after all, it's their money. So where there is a drop in the KPI's, the BW client is dropped or the activity tails off.

You can actually see the VCS/Excel activity dropping off which suggests that someone at BW is doing the numbers, which if you think about it makes commercial sense. Their key client (Lowell Portfolio) has proven debt whilst these parking tickets are unproven and therefore take up more resource and finance in establishing the case.

Any private equity/privately financed operation like BW are under the cosh to make returns of around 30%/50% on an IRR basis. Not for the faint hearted and they will burn a client that can't provide the caseload for them.

Now the question is - !!!!!! are Gladstones doing.

HeatonGuy

I have a funny feeling that we will find out what Gladstones are doing fairly soon.