LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - International Personal Finance reported strong lending growth across its third quarter, alongside "stable" customer repayment performance.
"Our positive momentum from the first half of the year continued during the third quarter and I am pleased to report that, in addition to delivering strong growth, our customers' repayment behaviour and portfolio quality remained robust," IPF boss Gerard Ryan said.

Ryan went on to add that the home credit business would maintain its "cautious" approach to lending over the fourth quarter, but expected IPF would deliver good quality growth for the year and highlighted the company's "strong funding and capital position".

Customer lending over the period was ahead by 15% with closing customer receivables up by the same proportion at constant exchange rates to reach £851m.

Customers numbers meanwhile rose by 2% to 1.75m, including an 8% rise year-on-year in Mexico Home Credit to reach 698,000.

In Europe Home Credit on the other hand, customer numbers slipped by 3% to 785,000.

Closing net receivables in Mexico increased 21% at constant exchange rates to £169m and by 13% in European Home Credit to £473m.

At IPF Digital, met receivables were up by 18% to £209m.

Repayment performance was stable across the lender's three divisions despite the "challenging" macroeconomic backdrop.

IPF also said it had headroom on undrawn facilities and non-operational cash balances of £93m as of September 2022.

"The current funding capacity together with strong cash generation, is expected to meet the Group's funding requirements through to the fourth quarter of 2023," the company said.

At the start of October, Fitch Ratings reaffirmed its speculative BB- rating for the company with a stable outlook.

As of 1051 BST, shares of IPF were trading down by 5.78% to 75.0p.

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