Occupiers IMA said buying the freehold gives them the flexibility to evolve the space

Creative agency IMA has acquired The Malthouse building in a £4m deal.

The global firm has taken freehold ownership of the refurbished 18th century former maltings having acquired it from the administrators of former landlords Leaseco 23 Limited, which collapsed last year. The building, which sits opposite Leeds Dock, provides more than 24,000 sqft of office accommodation, with Leeds city centre and train station only minutes away.

IMA have been based at the Malthouse since 2020, after moving from their location in Headingley, where the company was based for more than 30 years. The Leeds office is one of six, with additional bases in London, Amsterdam, Sydney, New York and Manchester.

Avison Young acted for IMA, which Cushman & Wakefield acted for the seller. The deal is described as reflecting the ongoing momentum of Leeds’s creative and digital industries.

A spokesperson for IMA said: “Leeds Dock has become a real hub for creative and growing industries, and it’s been an inspiring place for us to call home over the past few years. Our workspace plays a big role in shaping how we collaborate and support our clients, so having the opportunity to make it our own is incredibly important.

“Acquiring The Malthouse gives us the flexibility to evolve the space alongside our business and create an environment that truly reflects who we are. The process has been smooth throughout, and we’ve really valued the expertise and support from the Avison Young team.”

Leaseco 23 – formerly known as Leeds Dock Limited – owned 24 ground-floor commercial units at Leeds Dock, and was linked to two buildings there. The property-owning company’s finances deteriorated following the departure of a key anchor tenant in January 2024, leading to a big fall in rental income.

Despite the efforts of directors to refinance, administrators at Interpath were called in and appointed in mid December, 2025. A statement of affairs showed a total estimated deficit of more than £12m.

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From high-touch lender to fin-AI company

Speaking to ET Now, Agarwal said the company has deployed two Nvidia chips to run proprietary AI models internally, marking a shift from a traditional high-tech, high-touch lending model. The results are already visible in the numbers: cost of funds has dropped from around 12% three years ago to 10.3%, beating the company’s own 10.5% guidance, while yields have simultaneously risen roughly 10 basis points to 17.04%. Agarwal credited this combination — falling costs and rising yields — alongside ongoing AI-driven efficiencies for the company’s ability to defend its margins going forward.

Asset quality: A “collection first” philosophy

On concerns that rapid loan book expansion could hurt asset quality, Agarwal was firm that Paisalo treats itself as “a collection business first and a lending business second.” He pointed to a multi-decade track record since the company’s 1996 listing, during which asset quality stayed below 2% except during the Covid years, when it briefly rose before being brought back down within roughly six quarters. The company’s underwriting model functions more as a rejection filter than a disbursement engine, he said, with incentive structures across the organization weighted equally toward collections and growth.

No fresh equity needed for expansion

Despite pursuing aggressive growth, Agarwal said Paisalo does not need new equity capital, citing a comfortable 35% capital adequacy ratio and underleveraged 2.2x debt-to-equity position. Instead of diluting existing shareholders, promoters have been steadily raising their stake through open-market purchases — now at 46-47%, up from a low of about 26% four years ago. The company also has a $50 million foreign currency convertible bond outstanding, of which $44 million remains unconverted at a strike price of roughly Rs 48. With the stock now trading above that level, Agarwal expects meaningful conversion activity, and possibly full conversion, within the current financial year.

Four pillars driving 24-25% loan growth

Agarwal outlined four growth levers underpinning the company’s three-year AUM, revenue, and profit-doubling target: the shift to AI-led operations, aggressive distribution expansion, new product launches, and continued cost-of-capital optimization. Distribution has grown more than fivefold since 2017, expanding into 12 new states in the last three to four years to reach 5,299 distribution points across 22 states. Six new products were launched in the most recent quarter alone.

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AI is already doing the heavy lifting

The scale of AI adoption at Paisalo is substantial. In just two quarters, the company processed around 160,000 loan applications through AI-enabled onboarding, alongside 125,000 servicing cases and 225,000 risk management cases handled by AI systems. It has also run roughly 250,000 quality checks across audit, credit and operations functions using AI, while scaling from zero to two AI bots and five outbound voice bots handling 350,000 multilingual calls daily in Hindi, English, and Marathi.

Opex to stay elevated near-term, then ease

Agarwal acknowledged that operating expense ratios will likely hold steady or edge up in the medium term as the company continues investing heavily in in-house AI and IT infrastructure, including a revamped sourcing app and business correspondent platform expected later this year. However, he expects opex efficiencies to materialize meaningfully over the longer term as AI-driven automation scales across the organization.

OpenAI is weighing up handing the US government a 5 per cent stake worth $43bn (£32bn) as Sam Altman moves to shore up relations with Donald Trump ahead of the ChatGPT maker’s blockbuster stock market debut.

The offer, first reported by the Financial Times, has been tabled in recent discussions with the White House as the company prepares for a $1tn flotation in New York, a listing that would rank among the largest in corporate history.

Trump has made no secret of his enthusiasm for the American taxpayer taking stakes in the leading AI developers, describing the prospect as a “beautiful thing” that would make the public rich. “There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” he said last month. “You make them partners in this revolution. It would be a beautiful thing. It would make them rich.”

The logic behind the proposal is as much political as financial. Handing the public a direct interest in AI’s upside is seen as a way of blunting the growing backlash over the technology’s impact on jobs, a concern Altman himself has wrestled with publicly, and the relentless spread of energy-hungry data centres. Altman has previously floated the idea of a public wealth fund holding stakes in AI companies, and reports suggest he envisages rivals such as Anthropic, Google and Meta ceding similar holdings through a government vehicle.

OpenAI is currently valued at $852bn, putting a 5 per cent stake at roughly $43bn. Should the flotation hit its $1tn target, the government’s paper gain would be immediate, a point unlikely to be lost on a president who has boasted about the returns from Washington’s 10 per cent stake in Intel, taken last year at $9bn and now worth more than $60bn.

Quite where any OpenAI shares would sit remains up for debate. JD Vance, the vice-president, has said Trump favours a sovereign wealth fund, while others in the administration have suggested parking the holdings in “Trump accounts”, the investment accounts for children being established by the president. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing senator, has gone considerably further, arguing the public should own half of the AI companies outright.

The talks mark a striking shift in Washington’s posture. Having initially taken a hands-off approach to AI, the White House has become increasingly interventionist in recent months, blocking the release of Anthropic’s most powerful systems and forcing OpenAI to restrict access to its latest models, moves made against a backdrop of intensifying competition from China.

Anthropic, for its part, has proposed special taxes on the AI sector to fund a “digital dividend” for the public, a rather different route to the same political destination.

OpenAI, whose staff shared a $6.6bn payout in a secondary share sale last year, was approached for comment.

Jamie Young

Jamie is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, bringing over a decade of experience in UK SME business reporting.
Jamie holds a degree in Business Administration and regularly participates in industry conferences and workshops.

When not reporting on the latest business developments, Jamie is passionate about mentoring up-and-coming journalists and entrepreneurs to inspire the next generation of business leaders.