Morses Club plc (LON:MCL) CEO Paul Smith joins DirectorsTalk to discuss preliminary results for the 53 weeks ended 29th February 2020. Paul explains how Covid 19 has changed the face of HCC for ever, what this means for the company and sector and Paul’s views on the importance of the digital division within the group.
Morses Club is an established provider of non-standard financial services in the UK. The Group consists of Morses Club, the UK’s second largest home collected credit provider, and Shelby Finance Limited, Morses Club’s digital division, which operates under two online brands, Dot Dot Loans, an online lending provider, and U Account, which offers online e-money current accounts. The Group’s growing digital capabilities and scalable, highly invested IT platform has enabled the company to deliver an increasingly broad range of financial products and services to the non-standard credit market.
UK HCC is considered to be a specialised segment of the broader UK non-standard credit market. UK HCC loans are typically small, unsecured cash loans delivered directly to customers’ homes. Repayments are collected in person during weekly follow-up visits to customers’ homes. UK HCC is considered to be stable and well-established, with approximately 1.6 million1 people using the services of UK HCC lenders.
The HCC division is the second largest UK Home Collected Credit (HCC) lender with 221,000 customers throughout the UK. The majority of the Company’s customers are repeat borrowers and the HCC division enjoys consistently high customer satisfaction scores of 97%2. In 2016, the Club Card, a cashless lending product, was introduced and in 2019 the Company introduced an online customer portal for its HCC customers, which now has over 117,000 registered customers.
The Group’s growing digital division, Shelby Finance, operates under two online brands. Dot Dot Loans provides online instalment loans of up to 48 months to 20158 active customers. U Account is a leading digital current account provider offering an alternative to traditional banking by providing a fully functional agency banking service. U Account currently has c. 13365 customers.
