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…

P2P lending companies use many different ways to lower the risks of lending your money. I’m going to compare two of those ways today: secured lending and bad-debt provision funds. At 4thWay, we take great pains to avoid technical language or at least to explain it clearly…

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…

I want to show you how different savings and investments did in the year just gone by. I’ve not cherry-picked this information to make peer-to-peer lending look good. I’ve looked for precisely the information that I want to know when doing a serious comparison of savings accounts…

It’s like when your say that a piece of art looks beautiful while the man at your side shakes his head in disgust. You’re both entitled to your opinions. Similarly, there are no regulations that define what an A+ loan is, or an A, or any other loan…

Sorry that we missed this somehow, especially since I’m a Lending Works member: its bad-debt provision fund has got better from 1 January. The worst bit is that I was sort of told this by someone working there in December. Anyway… Here’s the situation: Lending…

When P2P ISAs arrive, probably this year, we’ll be able to lend tax-free, but a surge in lenders could see interest rates plummet. Here’s how to handle it. What good are P2P ISAs? Currently, when you lend your money through P2P lending websites in return…

P2P lending provision funds set aside to reimburse lenders like you and me when loans go bad are of widely different sizes and some pay out sooner than others. How big is your provision fund? Sources: the P2P lending companies and 4thWay® As you can…

Everyone’s always trying to beat the FTSE. I’ve seen several articles in the past few weeks touting shares that will do just that in 2015. The mere existence of the FTSE benchmarks seems to inspire competition for competition’s sake. 4thWay has its own benchmark of P2P lending returns…

Now is a very attractive time for peer-to-peer lending with interest rates well above where they should be for the risks involved. Why is 2015 such a good year? While borrowers are being quick to get on board for the lower rates and better terms,…

I wanted to know just what kind of disaster lenders like you and me could survive when we lend our money through property peer-to-peer lending company Wellesley & Co.* so I put it to a severe test with big property price falls and lots of borrowers failing…

There’s one risk that is completely ignored by many financial institutions. Dangerously for savers and investors, this blinkered vision filters through to financial and news websites, and even to professionals who should know better. This risk is such a huge risk for people saving in…

I totally missed the potential of this when the news broke a few weeks ago. Proplend, the property P2P lending company, announced that we can now lend through it in a pension wrapper. At first I thought you, me and most people were automatically excluded,…

With P2P lending company GraduRates closing down gently, I think its appropriate to take a look at the other companies that have gone out of business. Because I don’t want my money disappearing, do you? Let’s see what has happened in these past nine years…

Around 2004 or 2005, I can’t remember which, dentists suddenly started doing far more fillings and far less root canals. A few years later, German hospitals suddenly started doing lots more caesarean sections than previously. A few years after that, financial advisors in the UK suddenly…

This is the Candid Opinion blog, and you won’t see research into P2P lending companies anywhere else as that is as candid as in all the 4thWay® Insight Reports. We’ve just published our detailed research report into the oldest P2P lending company in the world: Zopa. Read…

According to Assetz Capital, business and property P2P lending company, businesses that borrow through P2P should technically withhold tax from individual lenders. If true, it still doesn’t affect P2P lending companies that have consumer borrowers. Just business borrowers. On the Assetz website it says: One significant area…

After lots of last minute punctuation and grammar corrections, we finally released yesterday our huge report into Lending Works. This is the P2P lending company that claims to be the safest and we think it might be right. Please take a look at Lending Works’ 4thWay®…

This is the Candid Opinion blog and now it’s time to be candid about the 4thWay® Risk Ratings. We’re proud of our scoring system and we’ll only get more proud as it proves itself and as we improve on it. The feedback we’re getting from the…