Presumably, that's how Kane migrated from selling office equipment to leasing and financing it with Woodchester before moving onto car finance with GE and then fully-fledged banking with Irish Permanent, where he was the chief executive who grew its market share of the residential mortgage market from 17% to 22% and developed its broker distribution channel. But people who've known him through all that change say that fundamentally his career has been about selling.

"Billy's a salesman, not a banker, " said one long-term acquaintance in the finance business who knows Kane from his Woodchester days. "He sells a product called money."

But as he told an interviewer himself nearly 10 years ago, the problem with selling money is differentiating your tenner from the other guy's tenner. It's a problem he's turned into an opportunity on more than one occasion, though. As one competitor put it, Kane is a "fast follower who's good at stealing ideas". Perhaps that's not entirely fair to a man who is otherwise admiringly described by his peers as a serial entrepreneur, but Kane has a habit of turning existing ideas to his advantage.

When he started SHIP (Shared Home Investment Plan), a residential reversion company he brought out in 2003, he was adapting a model already pioneered in Ireland by Residential Reversions Ltd (RRL) . . . still a rival today. And when New Zealand's Seniors Money entered the market in 2006 with an equity release mortgage product, "Billy was the one who reacted first, " according to a former PR agent for the company. Now SHIP, a subsidiary of Kane's holding company Finance Ireland, has been winding down its home reversion business in favour of building up its equity release profile.

As much as he has a talent for bringing businesses to life, he also has a knack for sending people the wrong way. Less than a year after announcing that Finance Ireland would be launching Nua, a subprime mortgage company for the Irish market, Kane announced two weeks ago that he would be selling his 40% stake in the venture to the majority partner, Investec.

Nobody predicted this outcome, least of all because Nua has barely got off the ground, having opened for business only in April. Investec's takeover of Kensington, the UK subprime lender which had a 64% stake in Irish subprime outfit Start, precipitated the decision, since Nua's articles of association do not permit its majority owner to run two brands in the same market. The consensus was that Investec would keep Start and divest Nua . . . but the opposite happened.

When Investec announced their intention to buy Kensington in June, Kane seemed confident in Nua's future. He told the Sunday Tribune that Investec was committed to Nua's future and that he was pleased with the progress of the business thus far. Declan Fitzpatrick, Nua's chief executive and an old colleague from Kane's Woodchester days, was full of praise for Kane's understanding of consumer finance and the mortgage market. The partnership seemed sound.

But then the US subprime market went to pieces and the securitisation market dried up, eliminating the source of ongoing funding that Investec had been counting on.

So when Kane said in a statement to the stock exchange that "the directors believe it is not in the best interests of shareholders to provide an open ended commitment of future capital to this business", it signalled the champagne had stopped flowing in Ireland too.

One industry source familiar with the Irish subprime market thought it was significant that Kane only got par value for his 40% stake.

"Why was Billy Kane happy to get out only what he put in? He came to the party quite late and would not have built up much value, " the source said, estimating Nua might have written about 50m in loans year-to-date. "It's clear he had to fund the business on an ongoing basis and had banked heavily on its success."

"Nua had hardly written its first loan and he was extending a line of credit on an old model of business . . . securitisation, " said another.

With an expected contraction in the lending business generally, perhaps Kane is following the smart money and timed his exit better than his entrance. As late as the announcement of Finance Ireland's interim results at the end of August, however, Kane was still singing Nua's tune, saying it was trading in line with expectations. But he also signalled towards an exit by telling shareholders the group was exploring "niche financing" opportunities in a possible "specialist car finance subsidiary" before the end of the year.

Multiple sources in the specialist lending area were sceptical of such a move, considering how capital intensive car finance is and how difficult it is to raise money right now.

"I can't see him getting it up in the current environment . . . he'd have the skills, just not the funding, " said one executive at a lending company with a background in car finance. "Where's he going to get the 150m per year for car finance?"

Kane reportedly has an 85m line of credit from Ulster Bank, plus 68m in assets on Finance Ireland's balance sheet, so 150m is not beyond possibility. However, Finance Ireland has committed 50m to equity release homeloans, while the assets on the balance sheet are mostly illiquid equity stakes from residential reversion contracts . . . an aspect of the business Kane hasn't grown since early 2006 . . . although one source with a possible buying interest said the book could be sold.

One of his main competitors in the lifetime mortgage business, though, is convinced Kane is going to stick to Finance Ireland's core business of equity release, saying "there's a lot more potential in it, it's the future of lending in Ireland". With an ageing population and a long-signalled pensions shortfall, despite the negative news on property and shattered debt markets borrowing on equity may be a strong bet after all.