You may have noticed that the lending rates you can earn are higher when a peer-to-peer lending website or IFISA first launches. Then, peer-to-peer lending rates fall over the following years to more sensible levels. The five possible causes of falling peer-to-peer lending rates are:…
Before you start to assess a P2P lending website or IFISA provider that does personal loans, it really helps to understand the characteristics and features of personal peer-to-peer lending. In other words: what are you getting into when you lend your money in these loans,…
Here’s a quick update on Proplend. Proplend’s finally gone and got itself a bad debt Proplend* has finally had its first loan funded by individuals turn bad, out of £70 million in lending and around 90 loans over five years. Enough time has passed that…
At 10.48am yesterday (Wednesday, 23 October), UK financial regulator the Financial Conduct Authority released this notice. This made public the news that regulated P2P lending website FundingSecure had gone bust, with CG Recovery Ltd (CGRL) appointed as administrators to the failed platform. FundingSecure operated a…
At our request, Mat Gazeley of Zopa wrote the following blog about its collections and recoveries policy, which has been published both here and on Zopa’s own website. Treating customers fairly and delivering value to them is the central idea behind Zopa. This means giving…
We try to explain peer-to-peer lending in What Is Peer-to-Peer Lending? However, it can sometimes be easier in an image. So we’ve created one for you called “How Peer-to-Peer Lending Works – For Investors”. Click on it to open it up. There is a mobile-friendly…
More common than closing down with fraud or incompetence hanging in the air, most platforms that stop doing peer-to-peer lending are simply closed because they have failed, stopped offering P2P lending products, or needed to be saved by other platforms. You never hear about most…
Peer-to-peer lending websites and IFISA providers that do not appear to have the correct permission from the financial regulator are the ones that are most likely to turn out to be the real monsters that cause panic, fear and financial loss to individuals. Below, you…
Crowd2Fund looked like it was going to take off. It was going to raise millions of pounds in startup funding through its own users this year. It was going to hire experienced staff. And it was going to become very transparent with its data, so…
Freelancer Cliff expresses his own unique views, ensuring you get different opinions to the more typical 4thWay experts and 4thWay researchers’ views. Read about Cliff. As someone with an interest in peer-to-peer lending, you’ve probably heard of Warren Buffett, the American billionaire who is widely…
My main research focus over the past few weeks has been on re-interviewing Growth Street, probing for more details, and pushing it for better quality data. This article covers all that, with my usually candid opinions thrown in. Check out my three-minute summary and, if…
Cliff is an experienced freelance investment journalist, who is 4thWay’s guest “P2P Cynic” and P2P investment fund writer. Read about Cliff. Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending website Funding Circle is one of the UK’s leading lenders to small businesses. Founded in August 2010, the business remained a…
Landbay has just announced that a “major financial institution” will lend another £1 billion through it. Landbay has previously arranged over £300 million in loans, with most of that coming from regular lenders. I asked Landbay* some of the key questions that our experts at…
Cliff is an experienced freelance investment journalist, who is 4thWay’s guest “P2P Cynic” and P2P investment fund writer. Read about Cliff. Five years ago, acclaimed fund manager Neil Woodford was sitting on top of the world. After 26 years of unparalleled success at Invesco Perpetual,…
Property peer-to-peer lending sites that use loan brokers or regional managers to attract borrowers always require an extra little bit of attention from 4thWay. Brokers don’t just do the initial assessment of a loan. They are also partly salespeople, selling the loans to banks and…
HNW Lending PLUS Rating update HNW Lending now has 3/3 PLUSes – the highest and top 4thWay PLUS Rating – on both its senior loans and junior loans. Previously, its junior loans had a 2/3 PLUS Rating. For junior loans, its 4thWay Risk Score ticked…
This is just a brief note on the two recent P2P lending site closures. Lendy has closed after lenders suffered a high amount of late and bad debt, as well as very expensive legal problems, among other things. (I wrote about some of its issues…
This is quite a bit of fun for me today. I’m going to look beyond peer-to-peer lending to my old, very well-trodden stomping ground of shares and savings, where I spent nearly 20 years of my life before peer-to-peer lending took over. If you want…
A property IFISA is a tax-free investment account where you can lend to borrowers who have real property – real estate – to back up those loans. This piece is based on a vast amount of research over many years. I could have easily made…
I’m going to explain some of the strengths and limitations of reserve funds. Then I’m going to write about three simple steps you can take to give yourself the level of safety you probably want and have expected all along, to get yourself prepared for…
