Those of you who like to take a bit more risk might try P2P lending company Mintos. Key risks It’s riskier because it’s new, having started in September 2014. It’s also riskier because, well, it’s based in Latvia, so I don’t know much about how…
I put it to the wise community at P2P Independent Forum whether personal guarantees count as secured lending. Before I share their views, here are two unavoidable definitions: Personal guarantee Business borrowers sometimes give their “personal guarantees” that they will repay a business loan using the owners’ and directors’…
For most peer-to-peer lending companies, a late payment is not newsworthy. But it’s different for Wellesley & Co. (4thWay® Risk Rating 12/50, putting it just slightly above savings accounts on the risk scale.) This peer-to-peer lending company has been around since late 2013. Wellesley & Co….
The big news for lenders today is the big jump in interest rates that I noticed this morning. In other significant news, Funding Circle is also celebrating £500 million of loans matched between borrowers and lenders like you – including me. Let’s start with the rate…
Individual lenders need to beware that: The difference between the highest and lowest bidders is typically around 25%. In addition, the majority of lenders bid lower than average, meaning some bidders are getting to take a bigger part of each loan at higher interest rates….
This morning I took a look through the Financial Ombudsman‘s complaints data to see if customers were complaining about any specific peer-to-peer lending companies. I tried over a dozen of the biggest names, including Zopa, RateSetter, Funding Circle, LendInvest, Wellesley and more. I found no…
There’s a whole world of ideas out there that we can learn from in our daily lives and that includes how we do P2P lending. A great place to start is to look into the biggest ideas in psychology, accounting, maths, physics, ecology and other disciplines….
I have recently been wondering whether some readers might be concerned by the increasing cosiness between banks and P2P lending companies? Since you’re not a very chatty lot – in terms of completing our article comments – I’m going to take your silence as a…
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…
It sounds like a train service, but it’s the latest P2P lending company to offer you the opportunity to do property loans. First Great National is a new peer-to-peer lending company focuses on developer loans with a maximum loan-to-value of between 70% and 80%. First Great…
Possibly the safest peer-to-peer lending company of them all, Lending Works, is increasing the interest rates from Monday 26 January. Lenders will then earn 5%. This is up from 4.3%, so it’s a big jump. It’s the interest rate you can expect after fees and…
How do you rebalance your P2P loans and other investments when parts of your portfolio do better than others? For example, when your share investments perform very well and you want to split your wealth more evenly again between shares and P2P loans. Or when…
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…
Recently, Zopa, the P2P lending website that started it all, changed the mix of loans that lenders will have their money allocated to, so that they can get higher rates. At the same time, it removed its rate promise, which means that you could potentially get less…
New pension rules coming into effect in April 2015 will already allow retirees to spend their life savings in one go, once they reach the minimum age specified in their pension policies, which is usually 55-65. Now, one peer-to-peer lending company is giving even earlier…
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…
ArchOver*, the only secured and insured business peer-to-peer lending company, is lowering its lending limit from £5,000 to £1,000 from next week. ArchOver only lends to one grade of borrower, which it calls, variably, “grade A” and “grade A+”, although perhaps its most useful description of…
Some peer-to-peer lending companies have had zero losses to lenders. They all have funds set aside to cover expected bad debts. And they have other protections, such as lending against property that can be repossessed if necessary. Of those, the ones that have the best 4thWay®…
