UK’s Provident – from subprime star to losses

WHEN it comes to subprime lending in the UK, sometimes the old ways were the best ways.

That’s the hard lesson stockholders in Provident Financial Plc learned as the British lender – a onetime darling of the FTSE 100 – struggles to recover from a botched attempt to modernise business practices that could have come from a Dickens novel. The company’s missteps, along with two probes by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), have triggered a 68% slide in Provident’s stock price over the last 12 months.