Amigo Holdings PLC (LON:AMGO) said the number of coronavirus-related payment holidays it has sanctioned is still on the rise.
In its results statement for the nine months to the end of December, the guarantor loan provider said payment holidays had been granted to 62,000 customers at the end of 2020; by the end of January 20201, this had risen to more than 63,000.
The company said its provision to handle the fall-out from customer complaints stood at £150.9mln at the end of the year compared to £18.7mln at the end of 2019.
The company, which has been hit by an immense amount of bad publicity and customer complaints, saw the number of customers slump by almost a third to 156,000 at the end of 2020 from 232,100 at the end of 2019.
The net loan book shrank considerably to £412.2mln from £722.3mln a year earlier, feeding through to a 37% decline in revenue in the nine-month period to £137.5mln from £218.0mln in the corresponding period of 2019.
The lender made a loss before tax was £81.3mln, versus a profit in the same period of 2019 of £45.9mln.
The cash position at the end of December stood at £164.6mln, up from cash of £30.2mln at the end of September, and has since risen to more than £165mln. At the end of 2020, the company had net borrowings of £179.5mln versus net borrowings of £466.6mln at the end of September.
Despite a material uncertainty surrounding the business as a going concern, the board considers that it currently has sufficient liquidity and other resources to continue to fund operations and support its customers.
“Amigo has made considerable progress over the third quarter of our financial year with an entirely new board enabling a fresh and different approach, focused on customer outcomes,” said Gary Jennison, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Amigo.
“When I started as CEO over five months ago, I knew we had to do something significant to deal with the complaints we were getting. We're very focused on doing the right thing for all our customers, including the 700,000 past borrowers and guarantors who no longer have a loan with us,” Jennison said.
The company instigated a scheme of arrangement at the tail-end of 2020 whereby all current and past customers of the company could register a claim about loans taken out between 2005 and 2020.
“The scheme was a difficult decision for us to make. We had to look at all the options, and we considered every possibility. We're doing it to treat all our customers and other stakeholders fairly and we believe it is absolutely the right thing to do,” Jennison said.
"We are paying redress due to customers with final response letters issued prior to 21 December 2020 and handling all final decision letters from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) prior to this date. We are still getting new complaints in, and our team is dealing with them, responding to them, and we're explaining to customers how they can benefit via the Scheme of Arrangement,” Jennison added.
Shares in Amigo, which rose from 10.25p yesterday to 11.46p, gave back some of those gains this morning, sliding 2.8% to 11.14p.