10 Personal Loans P2P Lending Websites

Last update 25th June 2015.

You thought that Zopa and RateSetter were the only P2P lending companies allowing you to lend to other people – rather than to businesses?

Guess again.

There are now 11 P2P lending companies (down from 12 due to TrustBuddy's closure) that help you lend small or large sums of money to individuals. The risks and interest rates vary considerably between them: from super-prime borrowers in the UK to payday loans and car loans to borrowers in continental Europe.

Here's a brief summary of the full list, although note that we cover pawnbroking P2P lending websites separately in Pawnbroking P2P Lending Websites Paying 10%+.

Not all of the companies below are already listed in 4thWay's comparison tables, but we're working on it. And we'll keep this web page updated as new ones appear on the scene.

Lending Works

Who? Lending Works* does personal loans only to “super-prime” borrowers. It has matched over £10 million in loans since the beginning of 2014.

Protections and bad debts: Moderate bad-debt provision fund to cover expected losses relative to its outstanding loans of 2%.

In addition, insurance covers you if a borrower is unable to repay due to accident, illness or unemployment. Expected annual bad debts are below 1% and actual bad debts have been negligible.**

Interest rates: Start from around 5% for three years and go above 6% for its five-year lending.

Who selects your borrowers? Your money is allocated to borrowers; you can't choose them. You can spread your money across multiple borrowers over time by lending and re-lending regularly or by staggering your lending into Lending Works.

Lending Works is already listed in 4thWay's comparison tables. You can also read more about it in Get Started With The Safest Peer-to-Peer Lending Websites.

Read more: Lending Works' Insurance Against Losses.

RateSetter

Who? RateSetter does mostly personal loans, although it is adding increasing numbers of business and property development loans to its books. It now does around 60% personal loans (and roughly 30% business loans and 10% property loans). It has matched well over half-a-billion in loans over nearly five years.

Protections and bad debts: Very fat bad-debt provision fund to cover expected losses that is nearly 4% of outstanding loans. Expected and actual annual bad debts are below 1%.**

Interest rates: Start from 3% for one month and head towards 7% for its five-year lending.

Who selects your borrowers? Your money is allocated to borrowers; you can't choose them. Your money is automatically spread across all the borrowers – that's thousands of them – in the event that the bad-debt provision fund is overwhelmed. This reduces the chances that a few bad borrowers will wipe you out.

RateSetter is already listed in 4thWay's comparison tables. You can also read more about it in Get Started With The Safest Peer-to-Peer Lending Websites.

Zopa

Who? Zopa does personal loans only to “responsible” borrowers. Within a few months it will have matched over £1 billion in loans since it started in 2005.

Protections and bad debts: Zopa has a moderate bad-debt provision fund to cover expected losses relative to its outstanding loans of around 2%. Expected and actual annual bad debts below 1%.**

Interest rates: Start from around 4% for three years and go to about 5% for its five-year lending.

Who selects your borrowers? Your money is allocated to borrowers; you can't choose them. Your money is automatically spread across dozens of borrowers and, very quickly as you re-lend or lend more, across hundreds of borrowers. This reduces the chances that a few bad borrowers will wipe you out.

Zopa is already listed in 4thWay's comparison tables. You can also read more about it in Zopa's Incredible Results In 2015 and Zopa Risks & Lending Speed Rise, Rates Stable.

mintos

Who? Since September 2014, mintos does loans to customers in Baltic States. Since the loans are in euros, this adds currency risks to you loans.

mintos does personal loans secured against vehicles. (And property loans too. Read about All The Property P2P Lending Websites.

Protections and bad debts: There is no bad-debt provision fund, but personal loans are secured against vehicles. The loans are, on average, for just slightly over half the estimated value of the vehicle at the time of purchase (although vehicles will go down in value over time, so will the size of the outstanding debt as the borrower pays it off).

You have additional protection if the borrower is “delinquent” for 60 days, which probably adds up to three missing loan repayments. In that event, a partner company will buy back your car loans. Provided it stays in business of course.

There have been no bad debts so far.

Interest rates: Typically around 11% interest if you spread your risks across lots of borrowers.

Who selects your borrowers? You can select borrowers yourself or select options to set up auto-lending, specifying such things as the kinds of loans you want to invest in.

mintos will soon be listed in 4thWay's comparison tables.

Read more: New Mintos Offers Great Autolend Options.

Bondora

Who? Since 2009, Bondora has done 400 million in loans to individual borrowers in continental Europe. Since the loans are in euros, this adds currency risks to you loans.

Protections and bad debts: There is no bad-debt provision fund or other protections.

Bondora hasn't shared statistics with us that are comparable to others, but it looks like something between 15% and 30% of loans have gone bad or are expected to go bad…

Interest rates: Which is why interest rates are generally between 20% and 95% per year.

Who selects your borrowers? You can select borrowers yourself or select options to set up auto-lending, specifying such things as the borrower grade that Bondora assigns to each borrower.

Read more: Bondora Makes it Easy to Compare Borrowers Across Europe.

JustUs

Who? JustUs (previously called eMoneyUnion) has been around since the beginning of 2013, although we don't know when it matched its first loan. We have no information on the amount of loans it has done.

eMoneyUnion personal loans can sometimes be secured, against vehicles for example – or sometimes against such things as pensions!

Protections and bad debts: JustUs pays just a bit more into its bad-debt provision fund than it expects in bad debts. We have no further details than that, nor do we have a single bad-debt estimate from JustUs for all their loans.

Interest rates: Generally above 10%.

Who selects your borrowers? You can select borrowers yourself or select options to set up auto-lending. Currently, JustUs is telling its customers that if you don't set up the auto-feature you might miss out on loans, since auto-bidders are gobbling them up quickly.

Read more: eMoneyUnion Offering Loans to be Repaid with Pensions.

Lendable

Who? Lendable is only available to high-net worth individuals, which doesn't include me! It doesn't share any information about itself to most of the world, so there's little we can tell you.

It looks like it is aiming further up the risk-and-potential-reward scale than the likes of Zopa, RateSetter and Lending Works.

Madiston LendLoanInvest

Who? Madiston LendLoanInvest has been live since early 2014, although we don't know when it matched its first loan to a borrower. We have no information on the amount of loans it has matched.

The P2P lending website provides limited statistics due to having completed relatively few loans.

Protections and bad debts: Madiston LendLoanInvest has an optional bad-debt provision fund that is probably moderately sized, based on the information we have. Expected annual bad debts are likely to be lower than 1%.

Interest rates: Seem to be very roughly comparable to Zopa or RateSetter but we have received no firm figures.

Who selects your borrowers? You can select borrowers yourself or you can automatically lend.

QuidCycle

Who?  QuidCycle has been live since 2014, although we don't know when it matched its first loan to a borrower. We have no information on the amount of loans it has done. The P2P lending website provides no statistics.

QuidCycle targets borrowers who have trouble and need financial mentoring – which QuidCycle itself offers, along with financial incentives to keep borrowers on track.

Protections and bad debts: Bad-debt provision fund of 1.5%, which is getting on the small side for unsecured personal loans.

QuidCycle expects 0.25% annual bad debts. This is surprisingly low. To my knowledge, every other P2P lending website that does forecasts is a lot more conservative than that. In addition, QuidCycle doesn't appear to go for “super-prime” borrowers.

You don't normally associate the sorts of borrowers it describes with bad-debt rates of 0.25%. Still, QuidCycle is small, so it can afford to be highly selective of its borrowers and so, for the time-being, it's not implausible that it might achieve its targets.

Interest rates: Roughly 4% to 6% between one year and five years.

Who selects your borrowers? Auto-spread across at least five borrowers. You will need to re-lend your money regularly or lend your money over many months in order to split it between enough borrowers to be on the safe side.

SAVY

Who? SAVY is so new that its website isn't even completely translated into English yet. Its borrowers are based in Lithuania. Since the loans are in euros, this adds currency risks to you loans.

Protections and bad debts: There is no bad-debt provision fund.  It provides us with no single average, actual or expected bad debt figure could range from 0.45% to 22%, depending on the quality of the borrowers you lend to.

Interest rates: Roughly 17% to 30% depending on the SAVY borrower grade, on small loans usually lasting 1-3 years.

Who selects your borrowers? You choose your own borrowers.

*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 Lending Works and RateSetter, 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.

**The reason these figures don't normally tally with those on the P2P lending companies' own websites is that we're writing here about annual bad debt and the websites often write about bad debt by year of loan issue. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but we chose annual bad debt for simplicity here.