Why Latitude IPO failed at the last hurdle

Latitude Financial - touted as the biggest initial public offer on the Australian market this year - has failed to get across the line.

The A$3.2 billion float ($3.43b) was originally pitched in a range of A$2.00 to $A2.25 but the offer faced considerable pushback from institutions.

Latitude - the company behind GEM Visa, whose advertising campaign was fronted by American actor Alec Baldwin - has a big commercial presence in New Zealand.

Independent research house Morningstar last week issued a downbeat report on the offer.

So why did Latitude fail on its second attempt to become a listed entity?

In short, the offer was pitched too high.

IPO promoters need to ensure that their offers get underway strongly, and the chances of that happening looked unlikely, even though the offer was pitched at the low end of the range at A$2.00.

Latitude Financial announced the withdrawal of its offer from the market following the conclusion of the bookbuild process last night.

"Despite extensive engagement with prospective investors, the board and shareholders have determined not to proceed with the offer," Latitude chairman Mike Tilley said in a statement.

"The board and shareholders were conscious of the importance of ensuring a strong after-market for the company," he said.

Latitude managing director and CEO Ahmed Fahour said: "While it is disappointing that we are not in a position to progress a public listing at this stage, we will continue to execute on the growth strategy with the support of our shareholder group."

Morningstar's report said the business was highly leveraged, exposed to lower credit quality and the competitive threat of rival buy-now, pay-later players such as Afterpay.

Latitude is one of Australia's largest consumer-financing businesses, providing personal loans, credit cards and no-interest financing products including a buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) platform called LatitudePay.

The company has about 2.6 million customers, 1900 merchant partners across Australia and New Zealand, and derives about 60 per cent of its business from big retailers such as JB HiFi, Harvey Norman and The Good Guys.

The business model centres on borrowing money cheaply in wholesale debt markets, then lending to consumers at a much higher rate.

The business was acquired from General Electric in 2015 and has come to market via private equity owners KKR, Varde Partners and Deutsche Bank.

Morningstar analyst Nathan Zaia said in his report the offer risked being overvalued.

Zaia assigned a "very high" fair value uncertainty rating to Latitude and said the offer should be avoided.

The stock was to have listed on Friday.