Vanquis Bank
Vanquis Bank performed well in the half year to June 2005. In the first quarter, the operations infrastructure was expanded to support the full scale launch of a differentiated credit card for the non-standard UK market. This expansion enabled a successful acceleration of customer recruitment in the second quarter. At 30 June 2005, 113,000 cards were in issue, up from 76,000 at December 2004. Receivables at the half year were £42.0 million, up from £12.1 million at June 2004. Turnover was £7.2 million (June 2004 £2.0 million).
Many of the costs associated with building a credit card business, including customer acquisition and impairment charges, arise in the early stages of the customer relationship, leading to a substantial early investment in start-up losses. This is reflected in the result for the first half of 2005 which, as expected, was a loss of £7.2 million (June 2004 £4.8 million loss).
