According to several broker sources, there has been a delay in getting procuration fee payments from Network Data since the beginning of the year, with fees taking months to be paid.
One industry source said: “Network Data is not very good at paying procuration fees passed on from lenders. It’s taking months to get paid, which tells me that my money is being spent elsewhere and there is a problem with the network.”
Another source commented that he normally expected to be paid within a month of a case completing, but at the end of March had 12 cases waiting to be paid dating back to January.
The broker said: “It’s not so bad for me because I’ve been quite cautious with money. But for those that have just set up, it will be difficult.”
Alex Cotton, chief executive of Network Data, said: “We had a technical problem with the payment run. We identified the problem and put all our resources into resolving it, but it took longer than expected.
"When we lost data, we had to re-key all of it and that compounds the backlog. When you’re talking about 600 cases, it takes a while. We are nearly up to date and are going to do an extra payment run as soon as we can to help clear it.
“I can understand in all the doom and gloom that people might think there is a problem but it’s purely a technical issue. We wouldn’t have got any funding line agreed if we had a problem. It was something that we could never have foreseen.”
