TDX: Nottingham's recession-proof business

There is no way on earth Mark Onyett would ever admit it, but the credit crunch is possibly the best thing that ever happened to his business.
He's the former Capital One banker who, seeing the way UK consumers were piling up their own personal debt mountains, sketched out with others a business that advised banks how to deal with people who couldn't or wouldn't pay what they owed.
The result, back in 2004, was the launch in Nottingham of TDX Group, a business that helped banks, utility companies and all sorts of other financial operations understand that there were cleverer ways of handling debt than just writing it off as a bad job or sending the boys round.
When the economy began its natural downturn towards the end of 2005, Onyett's company was well-placed for solid growth as those banks began to realise that, unless they applied some brains to the way they dealt with the people who owed them all that money, they'd be waving goodbye to mountains of it.
As it happens, the economy then picked up again in what we now know to be a thoroughly unnatural property boom. And the explosion of debt that ended that boom has seen those battered banks beating a path straight to Mark Onyett's door.
Yesterday, someone else turned up at TDX: the Bahrain-based investment company Investcorp waving a cheque for £28 million under its nose.
That cheque has bought them a 40% share of the City Gate House company, which is now set for major growth as debt-laden institutions around the world realise they need its services.
TDX, which is full of a crowd of ex-Capital One people and others familiar with the way finance and debt markets work, devised computer programmes that analyse the nature of the debt and advise on the most effective collection method or the best way to dispose of it.
Those systems have brought some sanity to a market that used to be a disorganised mess. They have also helped stop so-called debt management companies running amok among people tempted to sign up to an Individual Voluntary Arrangement to escape their debts.
IVAs are agreements that allow you to write off a proportion of your debt in return for a legally-binding commitment to pay back the rest. The advantage is that they avoid you being declared bankrupt. The disadvantage – one which some debt management companies exploited in a pretty unsavoury fashion – is that they are nothing like the get-out-jail-free card they were being sold as.
TDX played a part in curbing a trend which saw desperate people sign up to agreements which didn't solve their problems while the debt management companies trousered fat fees.
But that trend is inevitably rising again, as the credit crunch leaves more peoples' finances collapsing under the weight of their debts.
As debt problems rise, TDX is growing. You may not like the concept of success built on failed finances, but TDX is at least working to prevent one problem becoming another.
It also means there is at least one business in Nottingham that's recession-proof.