A year after restructuring its business and entering the mortgage broking market, Coneco Financial has called it quits. The group released its 2007/08 financial statement yesterday and confirmed advice it had given at the end of June that it would wind up the broking business.Late in 2006 Coneco sold a loss-making bottled water business, Palm Springs, to Neverfail and started looking for a new business venture.By May last year it had a new chairman, former Colonial State Bank managing director Stuart James, a new chief executive, Mike Ghenta, and a new business plan. The company saw potential in a fragmented mortgage broking market that would be forced by the pressure of tougher regulation to consolidate and become more professional.At the company's 2007 annual general meeting, James announced that Coneco had been accredited by 25 lenders, hired an experienced team and set up a leasing and asset finance division. He said the group had done $11.3 million of settlements in five months and had a $500 million pipeline of commercial deals.For the December half the group reported a loss of $583,000 on revenue of $141,000. For the full year the loss was $1.07 million.The company has cash of $3.2 million and has retained adviser Balnave Corporate to identify acquisition targets. If nothing turns up by the end of the year the company's shares will be suspended from quotation on the ASX.The review of operations in yesterday's financial statement said the company tried a few things to "steady the ship" but nothing was successful. These included starting a real estate sales division, acquiring mortgage management capabilities and introducing new products such as self-managed superannuation fund loans."In the end, however, the effects of the sub-prime crisis, which contributed to higher rates, the freezing of credit, the exit of non-bank lenders from the market, the compression of margins and the weakening of the property market made it not viable to continue existing operations."