Pepper Advantage Ireland, the mortgage services provider used by a number of investment funds for loans acquired after the financial crash, has named a one-time banker with Anglo Irish Bank as its next chief executive.
Niall Sorohan, who is currently chief executive of Cabot Ireland, the specialist consumer debt collection firm, will take up his new role at the start of 2025.
He will succeed Cormac Ryan, who signalled in May he was stepping down as head of Pepper Advantage Ireland for personal reasons, after seven years with the company. The business currently has 600 employees in Shannon and Dublin.
“Niall is an executive of exceptional calibre,” said Fraser Gemmell, chief executive of the London-headquartered Pepper Advantage group, which manages $55 billion (€50.5 billion) of loan assets globally.
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The leadership change follows Pepper, which services some 130,000 mortgage accounts, making headlines in recent years for charging some of the highest mortgage rates in the Irish market, after the European Central Bank (ECB) hiked its official lending rate from zero to 4.5 per cent in the 15 months to last September. The ECB cut its rate by a quarter of percentage point last month.
Pepper charges standard variable interest rates of as much as 9 per cent on behalf of underlying owners of mortgage portfolios it manages. Many of the borrowers are described as “mortgage prisoners” because they do not have a strong enough credit rating to refinance elsewhere.
Pepper also does not offer fixed-rate products as standard. However, it has been forced by Irish courts to apply fixed low rates in cases of insolvent borrowers securing a debt restructuring deal.
The company also unveiled a new so-called alternative repayment arrangement late last year for struggling customers that could see the interest rate fixed at a discounted rate for an agreed period of up to two years.
Mr Sorohan joined Anglo Irish Bank in 2001 and served as an associate director with the bank’s UK and European lending teams between 2006 and 2010. The bank was nationalised in early 2009.
He subsequently headed up the failed lender’s banking division in Ireland between 2010 and 2013. Anglo Irish Bank was renamed Irish Bank Resolution Corporation in 2011 and put into liquidation two years later.
Mr Sorohan has been with Cabot for more than a decade.
The latest set of accounts for the company behind Pepper Advantage Ireland, Pepper Finance Corporation (Ireland), show it made a pretax profit of €11.8 million in 2022, down from just under €14 million in 2021.
This was despite an increase in revenue to €59.1 million from €54.5 million a year earlier. The company’s administrative expenses increased in the period by almost €7 million to €48.6 million, with its payroll costs rising by €4 million to just under €35 million.
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