Mortgage Introducer understands that Barclays investment bank has been appointed by Friends Life, the insurer which owns Sesame Bankhall Group, to look at sale options for the mortgage network.
Two separate sources confirmed Barclays had approached various parties in the past month to discuss a possible purchase.
It comes six months after Resolution, the consolidation vehicle that bought Friends Provident in 2009, said publicly it would make no more acquisitions and abandoned plans to split the Friends Life business.
Today Sesame refused to confirm whether a possible sale was in progress saying “we never comment on market speculation”.
Friends Life and Barclays also said they would not comment on market rumour.
Sesame Bankhall Group reported a £1m trading profit for the first half of 2012 and a profit of £2.2m for the whole of 2011 despite the adviser network Sesame reporting a loss of £2.5m for the year, a substantial drop from its 2010 profit of £1.1m.
Turnover within the network business for the year was £170.3m, up from £162.9m in 2010. The firm claims to be the UK’s largest distributor of mortgages through intermediaries with more than £26.1bn of mortgage applications in 2011 taking its market share to 13.8% share of the entire UK mortgage market, up from 13.3% in 2010.
At the firm’s annual symposium Sesame Bankhall Group told members it planned to hike standard fixed fees by up to 42% this year following investment in a new practice management system, XPLAN, that will push up standard fixed fees for advisers from £44.20 a week to up to £62.60.
