It’s LandMark no more

LANDMARK White co-founder Glen White was surprised to hear of the company’s plan to rebrand to the Latin-inspired Acumentis when BB phoned yesterday.

The name is derived from two Latin words – acumen (a keen insight and sharpness in business) and mentis (mastery of mind, intellect, reason and courage).

“I’m off the board, I do not have a lot to do with the company now,” Mr White, who was attending a Christmas lunch at the time, said.

“It is sort of like, ‘out of sight, out of mind’.”

It has been a tumultuous year for the company, which was founded by Mr White on the Gold Coast in the 1990s.

Two data breaches, which saw its shares suspended in February and then again in June, led to a collapse in its share price to as low as 8.6c and caused key banking customers to stop using its services.

However, the company has been able to regain key banking customers and rebalance its books following a four-forfive entitlement offer at 8¢ a share to raise $5.45 million.

Mr White sat out the capital raising, seeing his stake cut to 6.89 per cent.

Timothy Rabbitt (pictured), the CEO of the new Acumentis company, denied the data breaches were the reason for the name change.

Mr Rabbitt said it was more to do with the merger with Taylor Byne.

“We worked all year under the LandMark name and got all of our banking clients back on. It is not really an issue of that (the LandMark White name being tainted by breaches). It is that we had three businesses put together in a short period of time and because of what happened to us this year we did not properly have a chance to merge those businesses,” Mr Rabbitt said.

He said the new name was chosen because it reflects “the resilience of our staff” and where the company is heading.

That included a move beyond valuation services to other areas such as tax schedules and depreciation.

He declined to say how much has been spent but said it was “money well spent”.