Best Innovative Finance ISAs In 2026

What are the best Innovative Finance ISAs?

The best innovative finance ISAs are these, which offer a market-leading risk-reward balance:

• CapitalRise IFISA. (Minimum £1,000 per loan.)
• CapitalStackers IFISA. (Minimum £2,500 per loan.)
• Housemartin IFISA. (Minimum £1 per loan.)
• Loanpad IFISA. (Minimum £0.01, spread across 100s of loans.)
• Proplend IFISA. (Minimum £1,000 per loan.)

I'll take you through all of these extraordinarily high quality lending accounts shortly. And at the end I'll have some further suggested reading for you.

But first, here's a bit more information about this list:

What features I want to see in an IFISA

I want to be convinced that lenders who spread their money across a batch of the best Innovative Finance ISAs, and plenty of individual loans, will come out with firmly positive results throughout any major recession or property crash.

I want to see professional loan monitoring and rapid steps taken to recover any loans that turn bad. I absolutely need to see that the P2P lending companies are very open, sharing a lot of information with us, so that we can be confident in our assessments.

All the best IFISAs are direct lending – P2P

All the Innovative Finance ISAs I've selected do peer-to-peer lending, as defined by 4thWay.

4thWay's focus is P2P, because the direct lending it enables between lenders and end borrowers substantially reduces the risk of making losses in the event the IFISA provider in the middle closes down.

Two features that aren't important in IFISAs

Rapid access is not important – here's why

I don't care about rapid access and I don't consider it a good criterion for selecting an Innovative Finance ISA.

As regular readers know, my position has always been that if lenders really think they will need and want rapid access under all circumstances, they should lend less money or no money through IFISAs and P2P lending accounts.

You must assume that a lot of your money will be lent until it is repaid by the borrowers, because sometimes this is precisely what lenders will have to do.

Why, you may ask? Because that is the nature of money lending. The natural life of the investment is from the time the borrower borrows until the time the borrower repays in full. In a way, getting your money back early is “unnatural” for this investment. Certainly, rapid-return features work most of the time – but you can't expect to fight nature all the time!

Smooth performance of every loan is not important – here's why

I also, personally, don't care if the type of lending that you can do in the IFISA typically leads to a lot of loans turning bad and which need a long time for you to recover your money. This is provided we can expect that the recovery on that bad debt is going to be very high and that interest rates will easily cover the remaining risk.

All that said, no IFISAs with that sort of bad-debt profile are currently making my best Innovative Finance ISAs list.

CapitalRise Innovative Finance ISA

A professional outfit with near-perfect results from largely senior lending, all secured against property. Senior lending meaning you're repaid first in the event the borrower has problems and the properties need to be sold.

This one is available to people classified as sophisticated investors or as certified high-net-worth individuals only.

CapitalRise takes an interesting contrarian view and focuses on prime London property lending, which is where others are cautious.

Yet the reality is that it's been a resilient niche for decades, supported by the increasingly wealthy super rich, and with low bad debt to lenders.

It also lends against properties in other wealthier regions.

Interest rates and bad debts

CapitalRise has had just a few write-offs and expected write-offs, despite a fantastically tough time for property developers in the past few years.

Part of its secret is that it builds a very lengthy safety margin into its loans, in the event that property developments face delays.

The CapitalRise Innovative Finance ISA* has recently been paying lending rates of 9.84%, after arranging £400 million in loans through its online platform. While bad debts will rise in some downturns or property-market crashes, I expect them to be very well contained – as it has already demonstrated.

How to lend

I favour spreading money across as many CapitalRise loans as possible, although sticking to one tranche of a loan when developers are receiving money in stages.

For CapitalRise’s most junior loans – its mezzanine loans – I prefer lending when the total loans are for less than 70% of the expected sale price. The total loans means all the tranches and loans from CapitalRise and the senior lenders combined.

The minimum lending amount is £1,000 and you always choose your own loans.

Visit CapitalRise* or read the 4thWay CapitalRise Review for more stats and information. Also, check it out in our IFISA comparison tables.

CapitalStackers Innovative Finance ISA

CapitalStackers has been paying the highest returns of all these providers since 2014.

The CapitalStackers Innovative Finance ISA* achieves higher returns, mostly in property development lending, by putting you in the riskier part of the “stack”: you are junior to one or two other lenders, meaning you get paid last in the event of a bad debt and the property needs to be forcibly sold to get your money back.

However, CapitalStackers' team is loaded with development experience, pragmatism, excellent skill with numbers, resourcefulness and integrity.

Interest rates and bad debts

Lending rates are typically over 13%.

CapitalStackers has had loans that required close monitoring and working with the borrowers to get the development project finished. Their experience in property helped them get those developments finished and sold.

In 2025, CapitalStackers had a couple of loans lead to losses. Its own directors and related parties of CapitalStackers took the brunt of the hit. But other lenders also lost money on those specific loans, showing why CapitalStackers pays out higher lending rates. Even so, most lenders have achieved highly impressive lending returns.

How to lend

CapitalStackers approves very few loans: maybe 6-12 per year. You should try to take part in as many of them as you can to spread your risk. There is no auto-lend feature.

The minimum lending amount is high at £2,500 per loan.

Visit CapitalStackers* or read the 4thWay CapitalStackers Review for more stats and information. Also, check it out in our IFISA comparison tables.

Housemartin Innovative Finance ISA

These are very different property loans to what you have done before. You're lending against properties leased to charities and housing associations, often with government funding, to assist people in the supported-living scheme.

Not only are you lending against tenanted properties – which is rare in online lending – but you earn interest that is usually tied to inflation-linked rents.

If all that sounds too boring, to make it interesting, you also take profits – or losses – when the property is sold.

Interest rates and bad debts

Lending rates in the Housemartin Innovative Finance ISA* have recently been above 7%.

In its early days, Housemartin toyed with some types of loans that it no longer does. Those loans had fairly mixed results.

However, looking at the types of loans it has focused exclusively on for years now, results have been very stable across its portfolio.

How to lend

When selling your loan parts to other Housemartin lenders the price you can get for your loans depends on what those other lenders are willing to pay. Over the short-term this can be less than the loan is worth – especially if interest rates have risen fast recently and the loans you're selling are for lower rates than lenders can get elsewhere.

When lenders vote to sell the property itself and have the loan finally repaid to everyone, your fortunes are tied to whatever the market price of the property is.

Thus, you should be looking to lend for longer at Housemartin – in the same way that a landlord will sensibly have longer horizons before needing to sell.

These could be loans for the medium-to-long term – so certainly over five years and really I think you should be considering potential holding periods of 10 years or more.

You choose your own loans and you should currently expect to take many months to spread your money into enough loans to build a reasonable portfolio.

Visit Housemartin* or read the 4thWay Housemartin Review for more stats and information. Also, check it out in our IFISA comparison tables.

Loanpad Innovative Finance ISA

This is insanely safe lending to add even more balance to your overall lending portfolio.

The loans have the best security in the UK's P2P lending and Innovative Finance ISA industry. On average the loans are around 40% of the valuations of the property and they are a maximum of 56% of the valuation.

Partner companies with decades of lending experience will lose their money before you, as they take a very large first loss by lending more to the borrowers in a separate, junior loan.

Interest rates and bad debts

The risk of losses on any individual loan is lower here than anywhere else. With lenders' money automatically spread across all outstanding loans, it's not conceivable that you'll make an overall loss.

Indeed, it's highly probable that you'll barely notice the difference to your overall interest rate even if there's a severe recession and property crash.

This explains why the lending rates in the Loanpad Innovative Finance ISA* are the lowest of all my selections at 6.0%.

Loanpad has had its share of loans that have missed payments and one or two that were technically bad debts. However, competent bad-debt recovery and the quality property security has seen these off with no losses to lenders.

Loanpad's professional team has helped to arrange £400 million in lending.

How to lend

Your money is automatically spread across all loans and adjusted as new loans come in or are paid off.

The only decision to make is choosing between the two accounts. Clearly, the Loanpad Premium IFISA is best, paying 6.0%. The other account pays a little less for potentially earlier access, but I've already explained that rapid access is not an essential feature of the best Innovative Finance ISAs.

Visit Loanpad* or read the 4thWay Loanpad Review for more stats and information. Also, check it out in our IFISA comparison tables.

Proplend Innovative Finance ISA

Proplend's offers attractive interest rates with extraordinarily good property security.

The fact that most Proplend borrowers are receiving rent against their residential and commercial properties adds an additional strong layer of safety not seen in most property peer-to-peer lending.

Proplend has a wide range of different types of borrowers, with properties from petrol stations to vineyards and from office blocks to residential flats. This spreads the risks in the event certain kinds of borrowers are impacted by a downturn more than others.

Interest rates and bad debts

The Proplend Innovative Finance ISA* has been paying 7.61% on its lowest-risk, senior loans, called tranche A loans. This is a phenomenal rate of interest for these loans.

These are mostly properties receiving rent that is 1.1 or 1.25 times the monthly loan payment. All of these loans are for no more than half the property valuation. That's a market-leading maximum limit for borrowers. It gives very strong cover in the event a borrower becomes unable to pay, and the property needs to be sold.

Proplend has a near perfect record since it started in 2014. Lenders have received almost every penny of their money back and interest due to them. Out of £265 million lent, there has been just one loan where lenders who chose a higher-risk, junior loan lost some money.

At just £40,000 in total losses, lenders have earned nearly 700 times as much money in interest, with around £30 million paid out to lenders. No lenders who have spread their money across lots of loans will have come remotely close to losing money.

Just one bad debt is outstanding and it's being managed by Proplend. Even if recovery attempts failed to get all of lenders' money back on this, it's a drop in the ocean. Diversified lenders will still easily expect to make a lot of money overall.

How to lend

Use Proplend's “AutoLend Self Select” feature to mostly select property loans that have all four of the following characteristics:

• “Tranche A” loans, which means the loan is for less than half of the property valuation (50% LTV or less).
• Loans that have never been renewed or rolled over, in order to reduce the risk of being caught out with a problem borrower that tries to kick the can down the road.
• The loans are based on commercial properties that are already receiving more in rent than the monthly loan payments to Proplend’s lenders.
• The loan is not connected to any other loans that you're already lending in, which usually means that it’s not to the same borrower.

While Proplend's other loans are also attractive, these particular loans have paid lenders exceptionally good returns after lending fees ,with no losses, and with a huge level of property security. A highly satisfactory reward for the risks involved.

If you put some money into tranche B or even tranche C loans, it comes with higher interest rates and higher risks as you're not repaid first in the event the borrower's can't repay in full.

If you have a lot of cash to deploy, you might want to simply lend in all loans that become available. Even though you're taking on some higher-risk loans, the spread of risk across many loans provides your protection.

The minimum you can put into a loan is £1,000.

Visit Proplend* or read the 4thWay Proplend Review for more stats and information. Also, check it out in our IFISA comparison tables.

4thWay articles linked to above

4thWay's Definition Of Peer-To-Peer Lending.[/left_bar_highlight]

And now read even more: 

The Peer-To-Peer IFISA Guide.