Mike Fuller, pioneer of enhanced annuities and equity release mortgages, plans a £50 million AIM float million for Just Retirement.

Deutsche Bank is nominated adviser and broker to Just Retirement, which Fuller says he intends to bring to AIM 'by December'. He founded the company in 2004 , with support from Unilever-backed private equity firm Langholm Capital, and now claims 55 per cent of the UK's fast-growing market for enhanced annuities, where insurers provide annual income with no time limit but offer better terms to smokers or others with potentially life-shortening conditions.

No float price has been finalised for Just Retirement, whose chairman-elect is former ABN AMRO Asset Management boss Tom Cross Brown. The company more than doubled annuity policy sales to £253 million in the year to June and its life arm, EEV, made £16.1 million net.

Just Retirement advanced £45 million of equity release mortgages, where homeowners sell their homes at below-market prices in return for the right to go on occupying them while their health or lives last. In the three months to September, annuity policies showed 180 per cent year-on-year growth to £128 million, with reinsurance from Hannover Re and Rabobank subsidiary Interpolis, and the company also made £15 million mortgage advances.

As the former head of Stalwart Assurance, which launched 'home income plans' in the 1980s and launched Britain's first enhanced annuity, for smokers, in 1995, Fuller says Just Retirement has 'great ambitions' for equity release, to be unveiled soon, and is already in the UK Top Six for enhanced annuities. The company works through Independent Financial Advisers and helped lobby for the regulation of equity release to give IFAs comfort.

Fuller argues Just Retirement can outpace competition from the likes of Mortgage Express and Northern Rock in equity release and GE Life (which Stalwart became when the financial giant bought it) in enhanced annuities. He says Langholm will sell only enough in the issue to achieve a 20-to-25 per cent free float.

This will be one to watch out for.