Where is the Bank of England taking us? And how does it trick us into letting it do so? The Bank of England does a quarterly poll to see where ordinary people think inflation is going. It’s last survey was in February. Please allow me to tell…
Until recently, FundingSecure has been bragging that no lenders have lost any of their starting money. But it had to happen eventually. Now, a small number of lenders have collectively lost £512 of their starting money. Presumably all those lenders are up overall, because FundingSecure…
This is the second article in 4thWay’s Lending Strategy series that focuses on strategy for a single P2P lending company, and I’ve decided to go with another big one: Funding Circle. As you will see reading the various strategies and techniques below, you can get up…
This guide will be updated regularly with the latest deceptively low risk P2P lending companies – our “hidden gems”. Some P2P lending companies are, in my opinion, hidden gems. These deceptively low-risk P2P lending companies might already have low 4thWay® Risk Ratings, but they also…
Neil wrote about the inevitability of some (not all) bad-debt provision funds eventually failing in his Candid Opinion blog, When The First Bad-Debt Provision Fund Will Fail. That blog was about under what circumstances a (hypothetical) fund can be expected to fail dramatically. Today, I…
Particularly if you use P2P lending companies where you can choose your own borrowers, you might be interested in lending to borrowers who are offer you a “second charge”. This article is about what security this gives you as a lender. We really try and…
Funding Circle has shown itself to be extremely adept at learning, so that it can improve borrower selection, lower bad debts and increase recoveries when loans go bad. Everything else being equal, this translates into higher returns. It also is likely to mean that bad…
Some P2P lending companies, like many businesses do, have been borrowing money. They might have borrowed as part of their start-up costs and they have certainly been borrowing for expansion. When a P2P lending company borrows money, it takes on risk. If its growth plans fail,…
At least one P2P lending company continues to make some unsupportable claims. The financial regulator recently reported that it’s had to ask P2P lending companies to stop bigging up the benefits while talking down the risks. Jane thinks the regulator gave the industry a B-. (Read Financial Regulator Gives…
Between us at 4thWay® today we could come up with just one oxymoron that was half as good as “recklessly conservative”. I’ll tell it to you later, because first I want to write about the first. This expression was used in a preliminary paper by The Open…
I really don’t like to bad-mouth competition because it makes us seem petty, but this is the Candid Opinion blog, and this latest information we have received from The Big Deal is eye-opening to 4thWay® readers. Before I criticise, them, I am absolutely convinced that…
Saving Stream is a secured loans P2P lending company that has been paying around 12% to lenders, with no losses to its 2,000 lenders. Now, in addition, it has launched the Saving Stream Provision Fund. Saving Stream Provision Fund Not only does Saving Stream lend…
Looks like it’s money awards season, with the Zopa Awards cabinet needing extra timber to support the latest additions. No sooner had I written about RateSetter’s fair personal loans award than Zopa wins two other awards. Zopa has beaten all the banks in the customer…
If lending fairly, with your borrower’s interests in mind, is important to you, RateSetter has just received an award that should boost your confidence in it. RateSetter is overflowing with awards like almost no other financial company. It’s clearly doing something right. But this new…
When my colleague “tweeted” (I still think of the word “tweet” in inverted commas. How square am I?) about one peer-to-peer lender helping itself through the new pension freedoms, it really rammed home how crazy these new pension rules are. In case you don’t know From…
More evidence that the top-grade loans at different P2P lending companies can be of very different quality. My thoughts on why you have to demand much higher interest rates from Bondora compared to Funding Circle. My colleague, Neil, recently gave an example showing that a…
Peer-to-peer lending companies get very high customer satisfaction ratings in surveys. Here, we collate some of the comments from their lender customers. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to negative comments! So we have to view the few comments selected by the P2P lending companies with…
Zopa, the oldest peer-to-peer lending company in the world, has increased its interest rates to 5.1% and 4%, but, at the same time, it has removed its rate promise. Zopa’s rate promise has been assuring lenders for over a year now that they will get…
AltFi predicts that we will collectively lend close to £3 billion to people and businesses in 2015. That’s twice as much as in 2014. The introduction of tax-free lending through new P2P ISAs might help boost lending even further. Lenders using RateSetter, Funding Circle and…
All individual lenders on Wellesley & Co. are now spreading their risks across 100 different loans. The number will likely rise as Wellesley continues to grow. Wellesley has just reached 100 outstanding loans. The property P2P lending company automatically splits all lenders’ money across all loans. It readjusts the…
