Morses Club PLC Issue of Equity (6612I)

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RNS Number : 6612I

Morses Club PLC

16 August 2021

16 August 2021

Morses Club PLC

Issue of Equity

Morses Club PLC ("Morses Club", or the "Company"), an established provider of non-standard financial services, announces the issue and allotment of 1,102,251 new ordinary shares of GBP0.01 each in the Company (the "New Ordinary Shares") pursuant to the vesting of awards under the Company's executive share scheme.

Application has been made to the London Stock Exchange for the 1,102,251 New Ordinary Shares to be admitted to trading on AIM ("Admission"). It is expected that Admission will occur at 8.00 a.m. on 19 August 2021. The New Ordinary Shares will rank pari passu with the existing ordinary shares in the Company.

Following Admission, the Company's enlarged issued ordinary share capital and total number of voting rights will

be 133,632,790   ordinary shares.   The Company does not hold any shares in treasury. 

The above figure of 133,632,790 may be used by shareholders as the denominator for the calculations by which they will determine if they are required to notify their interest in, or a change to their interest in the Company under the FCA's Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules.

Ends

For further information please contact:

 
 Morses Club PLC                                  Tel: +44 (0) 330 
  Paul Smith, Chief Executive Officer              045 0719 
  Graeme Campbell, Chief Financial Officer 
 Peel Hunt (Nomad)                                Tel: [phone] 
  Andrew Buchanan / James Britton / Rishi          8900 
  Shah / Duncan Littlejohns (Investment Banking 
  Division) 
 Camarco                                          Tel: [phone] 
  Jennifer Renwick / Jake Thomas                   4994 
 

Notes to Editors

About Morses Club

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 ("HCC") 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 Morses Club to deliver an inc reasingly 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 dir e ctly 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 million (1) people using the services of UK HCC lenders.

Morses Club's HCC division is the second largest UK Home Collected Credit (HCC) lender with 170,000 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 Morses 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 124,000 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 c. 20,000 active customers. U Account is a leading digital current account provider offering an altern ative to traditional banking by providing a fully functional agency banking service. U Account currently has c. 15,000 customers.

Morses Club listed on AIM in May 2016.

About the UK non-standard credit market

The UK non-standard credit market, of which UK HCC is a subset, consists of both secured and unsecured lending and is estimated to comprise around 10 million consumers (3) and total loan receivables of GBP10.7bn (4) .

Non-standard credit is the provision of secured and unsecured credit to consumers other than through mainstream lenders. Lenders providing non-standard credit principally lend on an unsecured basis and the market is characterised by high frequency borrowin g. Approximately 2 million people move annually between standard and non-standard markets (4) .

Since February 2014, unsecured personal lending has grown from GBP161 billion to GBP225 billion in February 2020. It has since contracted to GBP197 billion in March 2021(5) .

(1 High Cost Credit Review ANNEX 1 - July 2017)

(2 Independent Customer Satisfaction Survey conducted by Mustard 3 FCA High Cost Credit Review Technical Annex 1: CRA data analysis of UK personal debt - July 2017 4 Apex Insight - Non-Prime Consumer Credit: UK Market Insight Report - September 2019 5 Table A5.2, Bank of England Money and Credit Bank stats March 2021)

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August 16, 2021 02:00 ET (06:00 GMT)