The commercial director at Acenden – the mortgage servicing platform that administers loans originated by Lehman Brothers pre-2008 – confirmed the business is up for sale and part of the information memorandum for the deal considers a future as a mortgage lender.
The sale is being managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers, administrator for Lehman Brothers International Europe – the 75 per cent majority shareholder in the Acenden business.
Mr Maddox said: “We are hopeful we’ll find a new majority shareholder that can take off where LBIE left off.
“There are clear similarities between ourselves and businesses, such as Vertex, that provide support to Tesco Bank on the mortgage lending side.”
Acenden’s chief executive, Amany Attia, ran Lehman’s mortgage lender UK subsidiaries Preferred Mortgages and Southern Pacific Mortgage Loans businesses while Mr Maddox was head of securitised products trading for Lehman before the financial crisis and the bank’s subsequent collapse in 2008.
Mr Maddox added: “Things have changed a lot since then.”
Sally Laker, managing director at Bournemouth-based Mortgage Intelligence Holdings, said: “Any new lender coming to market will have to go through quite a rigorous process with the regulator. That is an area that I do think has changed.”
Background
Acenden employs around 300 employees in the UK and Ireland and the latest Fitch ratings report showed, at the end of June 2012, the firm managed 69,036 mortgage loans with an outstanding principal balance of £5.8bn. Currently the FCA register does not list Acenden as having lending permissions.
