Cliff is an experienced journalist hired in as 4thWay’s “Chief P2P Cynic” to give you the alternative view. Read about Cliff. A couple of months ago, towards the end of March, I had a one-to-one meeting with a leading light of the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending…
It’s very early days still for LendingCrowd, but so far it’s a tale of two halves: LendingCrowd’s lower-risk loans are easily on track for the top 5/5 4thWay PLUS Rating. But its higher-risk loans do not currently appear to pay lenders enough interest to cover…
The fact of the matter is that Funding Circle is absolutely the stand-out leader in unsecured business lending: It has a very long and large history to assess its record: £2 billion in loans since 2010. No-one else comes close. Its performance has been highly admirable…
Recently I was a bit confused about the difference between Assetz Capital’s various products, in particular when you want to get early access or get your money lent quickly. After asking Assetz Capital for clarity, I just want to quickly share this with you in…
Some P2P lending sites have to make changes to satisfy the financial regulator, which could mean you sometimes have to wait weeks before all your money is lent. The Financial Conduct Authority has frowned upon pre-funded loans in some cases. “Pre-funded” means that either the…
Question from anonymous 4thWay reader “I have been investing in P2Ps for a number of years now. These include RateSetter, Zopa, Lending Works* and Landbay*. My experience across all four has, in general, been good. “Last November I invested £8,500 with Funding Circle for the…
Crowd2Fund does business loans and it is available in an IFISA (a tax-free P2P lending account) paying 8.5% or more before bad debts. I’m going to show you one way to select individual business loans to lend in at Crowd2Fund for yourself, rather than relying…
Bad debt: that’s when a loan goes past just being “late” into what’s called “default” or “non-performing”, and even beyond – when not all that debt can be recovered and it is “written off”, never to be seen by lenders again. Bad debts are a fact…
Last year, RateSetter announced changes to its bad-debt provision fund that will now take place in March. The old way RateSetter’s provision fund worked Individual lenders lend to specific borrowers (although you don’t get to choose your borrowers). RateSetter’s bad-debt provision fund covers losses that…
I fielded a call from a lender who wondered, only very mildly worried, about Funding Circle’s changes to its property loans, which it announced a short time ago. There are two changes. Some property loans to get a worse grade Funding Circle is going to…
It can be a little exasperating to see individual lenders using the comments section under my articles on 4thWay, or in their emails to me. The main cause of the exasperation is when they write something like this: “I’ve earned good money with that P2P lending…
I wrote this piece to give those of you new to Wellesley a little background to go with the recent sell alert from my colleague, Neil Faulkner, which you can read here. What Wellesley does Wellesley does development and bridging loans. It has four loans…
Neil Faulkner says that with low interest rates for lenders, less impressive loan book performance than similar competitors, increased risks from borrowing to lend and not enough of the right kinds of unambiguous information and data, he sets out his opinion that, if he was lending…
Finally, 4thWay has enough information to list in our comparison tables, for the first time and not for the lack of trying, one of those rare of P2P lending things: an IFISA product. These offer completely tax-free P2P lending. Like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, there are only…
May people say that P2P lending websites hve lost their way; they’re not P2P any more. And when I say “many people say”, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t mean me. I mean a lot of financial journalists and individual lenders are saying it. I’ve heard them…
The providers of P2P lending in the Evolution SIPP, Greyfriars, announced in late 2016 that from 1 January 2017 it will open no new P2P lending accounts and no new P2P lending can take place through its SIPP. Greyfriars stated that the reason for this…
Here are the latest peer-to-peer lending customer ratings of the main providers. You can’t take the following as absolute proof of overall customer satisfaction, because companies can encourage customers who they know to be happy to rate them online. There will also be many borrowers…
To see the most recent question read here (opens in new window). Question from Simon “Could you please do an assessment of crowd stacker and crowd2fund? I have a lot of money currently in a stocks and shares ISA that I would really like to move…
If you’ve got a question for us, we always try to find time to give you a comprehensive answer, so please get in touch at contact@4thWay.co.uk Question from David, 4thWay user Wanting to know if I can open an ISA that will allow me to…
How did I get here? It’s a question that many investors – in any investment – might be asking quicker than you think. Let me get to the point in a laborious and roundabout route. I’ve always been a fan of stock-market tracking funds: index…
