Mortgage lender Pepper Group has picked Goldman Sachs and Macquarie as advisers for its potential $1 billion initial public offering.
The IPO has been slated for the second half of the year. Pepper earlier appointed Highbury as its financial adviser to help with the float plan.
Pepper has been a rising star in the finance industry, increasingly competing with heavyweights when it comes to acquisitions of major loan portfolios.
Run by Mike Culhane and Patrick Tuttle, the non-bank lender has global operations and generates earnings from loans, particularly those offshore, and fees from servicing portfolios of third-party commercial and residential loan portfolios.
A potential float has been on the cards since last year as part of its quest to gain more access to capital.
The group currently has about $28.6 billion of loan and lease assets under management worldwide. Annual revenue has grown from $74m in 2009 to $329.9m in 2013 and net profit has almost doubled in that time to $28.8m.
The company has been looking to beef up its Australian operations and, along with Macquarie, was one of the bidders for GE Capital’s Australian consumer finance business, but was outbid by a consortium of KKR, Deutsche Bank and Varde Partners.
This article first appeared in The Australian Business Review