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Capstone emerged intact after the Lehmans collapse and is now moving onwards and upwards, offering a wider range of services to the market as Acenden
When future generations look for a firm whose fate sums up the credit crunch and its underlying causes they'll be hard-pressed to find a better example than Lehman Brothers.
The investment bank's collapse on September 15 2008, the biggest bankruptcy in US history, sent shock waves around the world and resulted in a global downturn as everyone realised that Lehmans fell into the category of 'too big to fail'.
With the company having run out of steam, its administrators quickly got to work selling off the bits that were salvageable such as its US investment and trading divisions.
Lehmans' three UK brands - Southern Pacific Mortgage Limited, Preferred Mortgages and London Mortgage Services - had pulled out of the market long before Lehmans went under.
This left its servicing operation, Capstone Mortgages, which continued to service the mortgages of the three brands. And incredibly, despite the turmoil of recent years the company is still around, and from today is rebranding to Acenden as it throws its services open to the wider market.
So when Mortgage Strategy met Acenden's chief executive officer Amany Attia and commercial director Martin Frazer, the first question was - what happened to Capstone when Lehman collapsed and how was it that the firm survived against the odds?
"When Lehmans went under Capstone never went into administration," says Attia. "On its own Capstone was financially sound and viable. The administrators initially looked at selling all the businesses including Capstone and a number of assets, and asked me to work with them on that. They ended up putting the businesses up for sale and received a lot of interest."
At that point Capstone had about 90,000 accounts, with around pound 8bn worth of servicing assets. Capstone's management team, headed by Attia, tabled its own business offer and management plan, and the administrators liked this so much that they decided that there was more value in keeping Capstone and trying to grow it rather than sell it.
"Originally, it was going to be a full management buyout but the administrators decided not to do that because they thought...