A NEW chairman will be appointed by one of Bradford’s largest employers in September.

Patrick Snowball has been announced as the man to lead Provident Financial Group forward and Stuart Sinclair, the interim chairman, will retire from the board.

Previous chief executive Peter Crook stepped down with immediate effect in August last year after the company had to issue a series of profit warnings.

Mr Snowball previously worked for Suncorp Group Limited where he was CEO from 2009 to 2015.

He joined Suncorp from Aviva where he was a director from 2001 to 2007.

As CEO he played a key role in merging and consolidating Norwich Union, Commercial Union General Accident and London and Edinburgh into Aviva General Insurance.

This comes after the company shared their interim results for the six months to June 30.

Although the group said they are making "good progress" on its operations, which include collections, the key financial results show their profits have dropped since 2017.

The company recorded a £98.6million adjusted profit in 2017, but only a £74.9million result in the year to date.

There was also a significant drop in the Goodwin Street company's statutory profit, with the figure dropping from £73.3million in 2017 to £34.6million this year.

Bosses have put this down to the changes made to the way they make collections, but maintain the goals they have made for 2018 are on track.

Provident has suffered a turbulent 12 months, with both companies, credit card issuer Vanquis Bank and car finance provider Moneybarn, starting talks with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) over its respective investigations.

Malcolm Le May, chief executive, said: "The implementation of the home credit operational recovery plan is going well, we have commenced our ROP refund programme after a successful pilot, and we remain engaged in constructive dialogue with the FCA on their investigation at Moneybarn.

"Collections performance in home credit in the second quarter did not show the improvement we expected mainly due to lower collections from customers who were live during the poorly executed migration to the new operating model last summer.

"However, customers who took credit from us since then are performing in line with historic levels, indicating to me the changes we are making to our model are working. "