Willie van Aardt, CEO of Finbond, said the company would be listing next Friday and that this would place it in a “very unique market position” as all its competitors were private, unlisted companies.

Van Aardt said that on the day of listing, the company would have 229-million shares in issue.

Its private placing was done at R2,25 a share, which would give it a market capitalisation of R517m on the listing.

The private placement offer was still open and would close tomorrow , but Van Aardt said the shares were “already substan-tially oversubscribed”.

He said Finbond took the decision to list on AltX with its merchant bank.

“With our market capitalisation of about R517m, we thought it was more suitable to list on AltX,” he said. He said the listing on the main board of the JSE was “not in the pipeline” at this stage.

“The companies similar in size to us that have listed on AltX over the past year to 18 months have performed very well,” said Van Aardt.

He said it was the first opportunity for investors to gain access to the mortgage origination industry, which generated 60%- 70% of all mortgage advances in SA.

Last year, the total amount of mortgage advances by lending institutions in SA came to nearly R700bn, the majority of which was generated by mortgage originators, said Van Aardt.

The mortgage origination industry is only about nine years old in SA, but is well established in the US, Australia and the UK.

Mortgage originators shop around for the best mortgage bonds available for their clients. They then place the client’s bond with one of the major banks.

Van Aardt said the company referred between R800m and R1bn worth of mortgages to the four major banks every month.

It has 25 branches, 75 independent business units, 80 agencies and 500 agents, brokers and consultants operating across the country.

Finbond’s business activities include mortgage origination, debt consolidation and equity release, bridging finance and term loans.

The company was established four years ago by Van Aardt.

The company recently acquired 100% of Independent Bond Originations, Dimension Financial Services, Bondmaster and Blue Dot in order to “bulk up its business ahead of listing”.

Van Aardt said that all the companies it had acquired were mortgage originators.

Finbond is also expecting its after tax profit to rise to R58,8m next year from R22,6m in the year to February.