GLI Finance (where the author is a non-executive director) has announced its results for 2014. Over the year GLI’s net asset value rose from 50p to 51p. Revenues were depressed by the sale of the fund’s CLO portfolio to Fair Oaks Income Fund in the middle of last year (Fair Oaks didn’t pay its first dividend until after the end of GLI’s year). The dividend has been maintained at 5p per share.
Stakes in a number of new loan origination platforms were acquired during the year and three more have been concluded since, bring the total number of platforms up to 18. The largest deal was the acquisition of the rest of the Sancus platform that GLI didn’t already own. this brought with it an expanded executive team and moved the company closer to being a straightforward trading company rather than a fund. The three new acquisitions in 2015 have been TradeRiver USA, a non-bank online funding solution which finances trade, both cross-border and in the US; MyTripleA, a peer to peer lending platform operating in the Spanish market that facilitates alternative financing transactions between borrowers and lending investors; and The Open Energy Group which is a financing platform for US commercial and small utility-scale solar projects.
The volume of loans originated on the platforms increased by 49% over the year. The average rate of interest on the loans that GLI made through the platforms was 11.1%. The CEO has reiterated his statement that he expects that the income generated by GLI’s new loan investments will in time be at least as high as the income that was being generated by the CLO portfolio.
GLIF : GLI Finance reports on transformational year