Who Owns The P2P Lending Sites?

For fast-growing startup companies – which includes most P2P lending sites – being profitable isn't usually the best measure of whether it will succeed. This is especially the case since most of them are not profitable.

And you don't expect them to be. They need and want to grow rapidly and to do so they have to plan to burn more money than they make.

To see if a P2P site seems safe from going out of business, at least for the foreseeable future, it could be more effective to see who is backing them.

Are they being backed by investors, preferably from big-name investors, who have bought shares in their businesses? Or, were they founded and are being operated by profitable and far larger businesses?

Here is how some of the P2P lending sites are doing that have more impressive owners or have received a lot of money from investors:

• MarketFinance received £26 million From Northzone, Barclays and Santander Innoventures in 2019. Previously it had already raised £5 million from Northzone in 2014, and £7.2 million more from both Northzone and MCI Capital, a listed Polish private equity group, in 2016. Northzone is an early-stage investment company that invested in Spotify and Trustpilot.
• ArchOver* is owned by Hampden Holdings Limited, which manages insurance assets and underwriting capacity in excess of £2 billion and has a long, family-owned history. For most of the past decade, Hampden has made seven- or eight-figure profits. Hampden also lends in loans on the ArchOver website.
• LendingCrowd* received £6.2 million from Upscale in 2019, which claims on its website to have helped tech startups raise £1.4 billion. This is on top of an earlier raise of £2.2 million in funding in spring 2018 from Equity Gap and the Scottish Investment Bank.
• Previously, in 2018, was backed to the tune of £2.8 million by Maven Capital Partners, Pollen Street Capital and NVM Private Equity.
• Downing Crowd is owned by Downing LLP, a profitable fund manager that manages £1 billion of investments.

Read Which P2P Lending Sites Are Profitable?

*Commission, fees and impartial research: our service is free to you. 4thWay shows dozens of P2P lending accounts in our accurate comparison tables and we add new ones as they make it through our listing process. We receive compensation from ArchOver and LendingCrowd, and other P2P lending companies not mentioned above either when you click through from our website and open accounts with them, or to cover the costs of conducting our calculated stress tests and ratings assessments. We vigorously ensure that this doesn't affect our editorial independence. Read How we earn money fairly with your help.