Time Finance plc (LON:TIME) Chief Executive Officer Ed Rimmer caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss interim results for the six months ended 30 November 2025, highlighting strong lending growth, improved credit quality, and increased profitability.
Q1: Ed, a positive set of results. Can you just talk us through the main trading highlights for the period?
A1: We’re obviously talking about the first half of our financial year which runs to November 2025 so comparisons with the previous half year to November 2024 have been pretty positive.
In terms of some key highlights, the new business origination was up 48% year on year which is really pleasing to see so obviously lots of activity still in terms of new business. That has led to our lending book increasing to a new record high, £235 million at the end of the half year and pleasingly that has not been at the expense of a deteriorating credit quality. So, our arrears in that period has actually reduced from 5.3% to 4.5% and the bad debt write-offs from 1.2% to 1%.
All that means is that profitability has increased further and the margin has increased further in terms of the profit before tax margin up a further 2% to 23%. That’s pleasing particularly because our focus obviously is on growing the business but also making sure that it grows more efficiently than we have done in the past and ultimately increasing that profit margin which we’ve done.
So, I think the combination of new business origination, making sure that the arrears has been well controlled and ultimately increasing the profit before tax and the profit before tax margin means that overall it’s a good set of results.
Q2: Who is Time Finance’s typical customer would you say?
A2: Typical customers are all small businesses so it could be anything from a new start business to a business typically turning up to around £10 million. The cash requirement can be as little as £5,000 up to £5 million and I would say that typically our ideal customer borrows £200,000 from us. That could be through an invoice finance facility or an asset finance facility or a combination of both. We’re seeing an increasing trend of businesses that need more than one facility and that’s where our multi-product lending portfolio comes into play.
Businesses are all small businesses, quite a lot of family owned businesses, they could be second or third generation. They could be run by new entrepreneurs but they’re all what you would class as very down to earth, working class, small businesses in a range of sectors. We’re very well spread in terms of our sectors that we lend money into; the highest concentration is around 15% that we have into logistics and haulage.
So, that hopefully gives you an idea of our typical customer.
Q3: What can we expect over the next 12 months and how might the company look in three years’ time?
A3: We’re six months into our new three year plan, which we put in place at the end of our last cycle, which was a four year plan to May ’25 so we have a new three year plan to May ‘28. As I say, we’re just six months into that now so I think in three years’ time, obviously, we hope to have delivered that plan ultimately.
That plan is basically a four pronged attack. It’s growing the lending book to over £300 million, making sure that we focus on the right credits so keeping those arrears within the 5-6% range. They’ve come down as I reported but we are in the lending business, we are going to have businesses that don’t pay on time, it’s obviously about making sure we have the right controls in place to manage that. Making sure that efficiencies are very much a key focus of our strategy so process improvement and technology enhancements and challenging the way that we’ve done things within our back office functions to make sure that we can grow without taking on significantly more headcounts and getting that PBT margin up to the mid-20s. That’s our target.
Within all that leveraging our brand. So, making sure that the market understands who we are and also making sure that our colleagues across the business are really engaged. We’ve started to place a much more heavy emphasis on colleague engagement over the last four or five years since I was Chief Executive.
We’re doing our net promoter scores with our introducers and our clients to measure how satisfied they are, and we also got an accreditation with a very good rating, a one star rating with Best Companies, which is something we’re going to repeat this year.
So, it’s really about delivering those four key objectives and if we do that successfully, we’ll have achieved our plan at the end of it over that three year period.
Q4: What makes now the time to invest in Time Finance?
A4: Well, I guess a couple of things, really. Our share price has been on a good run for a year or so, but it slipped back a little bit over the last few months. Nothing to do with us. We’ve delivered our results, I think that’s the vagaries of the wider market and the AIM market that we’re on. So, I would say the share price is probably in a good position to invest at the moment in terms of the cycle of growth.
We’re trading around tangible net asset value, we think there’s quite a bit of room to increase that, so I think that the timing of that is good.
I think the timing of the economy is also good. Alternative finance businesses like ourselves tend to do better in times of boom and bust. Businesses that need cash to grow and businesses that need cash to survive and keep the lights on and I think we’re in those times at the moment. The banks are pulling back more and more from the smaller business side of lending to businesses and that provides opportunities for businesses like ourselves that are a little bit more agile, nimble, quicker to market, flexible and ultimately provide that sort of service that small businesses need.
So, I think this cycle that we’re in at the moment in terms of economic cycles is good for us and we’ll continue to do well and grow the business.
