One of the first measures of risk in a P2P lending company is its historical – or “actual” bad-debt rate. This shows how many pounds of loans have gone bad as a proportion of the money lent. The bad-debt rate is variously called the “loss rate”, the…
This is the story of whacky individual lenders and their high-risk loans. The problem is that this doesn’t seem to be a rare event! I see this happen on numerous P2P lending websites. But I’m going to take FundingKnight as my example today. I only use…
P2P lending company Funding Circle is now offering 20% off Virgin Train travel to people lending their money through its service. Funding Circle is the fifth largest net lender to businesses in the UK and it offers a low risk, market beating opportunity to individual…
Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs has ruled that individuals lending their money through P2P services must pay tax on their lender fees from 6 April 2015. P2P lending website Zopa revealed this in an email to its lenders this evening. Up to this point, lender fees…
I listened to the Money Box interview Neil referred to in P2P Lending is Not Like Picking Shares. (Yes, I’m eight months late too, but I hadn’t even heard of 4thWay® back then.) In that interview, Andy Mullinger of Funding Circle, a business loans P2P lending…
Zopa, one of the safest P2P lending companies and the oldest in the world, has given the vast majority of its lenders higher returns over the past ten years than a large variety of investments, including the stock market and savings accounts, according to its…
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…
