California Cash Advance Company Relocates to Florida
By J.J. CameronPayday Loan Writer
Despite it success as an instant payday loan company in The Golden State, Allied Cash Advance has relocated its corporate headquarters from the Bay Area to Miami, citing the high cost of doing business in California, the company said Wednesday.
The business was founded in 1999 with a single location in Northern California.
Today, ACA is one of the nation's largest payday cash loan lenders with more than 250 branches in a dozen states. The move took place in 2005 but the company didn't make an official announcement regarding it until this week.
Indeed, Allied is a long way from its early days when John Lie-Nielsen and Scott Crockett left their corporate finance positions at Montgomery Securities, now part of Bank of America, to launch the payday advance lender.
The creation of Allied grew out of the bankers' careful reading of a payday advance lender's regulatory filing to go public, which was being handled by a rival investment bank. The two bankers, whose friendship goes back to their college years, liked what they saw in terms of the profitability of extending short-term loans to school teachers, mechanics and others who sometimes have trouble making ends meet at the end of the month.
The bankers also got inspired to be entrepreneurs after sitting in countless meetings at Montgomery.
"We saw that the person with the most money in the room wasn't necessarily the smartest, but the one who took action," Lie-Nielsen said.
Can't blame the guy for trying to make a buck.
