This is just a brief note to say that, this weekend, Wellesley & Co. has slightly dropped the interest rate on its 30-day notice account, which it calls its Easy Access account, from 3.66% to 3.55%. We wrote about Wellesley & Co’s other interest rate…

This article was updated on 2 May, to explain an additional interest rate change made by Wellesley on that day. Property P2P lending website Wellesley & Co. has increased interest rates on all its deals as of today, 1 May. Except for one deal which went…

Proplend has now launched a “secondary market”, which is where you can buy and sell existing loan parts. Previously, with Proplend, you could just lend your money at the start of a new loan and there was no secondary market where you could sell it…

Last Friday I chaired a panel show for the first time. It was the property peer-to-peer lending panel at the Property Investor Show in ExCeL, London, and there were a lot of great questions from the audience. The panel were representing P2P lending websites that do…

In the past year, SIPPclub has been working with a number of the P2P platforms to enable them to accept SIPP money. This is good news, for it enables you to earn your interest tax free. Compared to lending money personally, the effect of earning…

Zopa lenders have so far lent £800 million and this week their grand total interest earned hit £50 million. That’s since Zopa launched in 2005. But over one-third of that interest has been paid to lenders in the past year alone, as Zopa grows rapidly…

Low-risk RateSetter has overcome considerable regulatory barriers to become the first personal loans P2P lending website to allow its lenders to lend through a pension. Indeed, two pensions. Lending through a pension means you pay no tax on the income you earn. Pensions come with…

Here’s a short, but certainly sweet, article. I just had to pull a recent 4thWay® article explaining how 13% earned interest and 6% bad debts could leave you with a profit of less than 2%, all because we are taxed on the bad debts that…

Lending Works, one of the safest P2P lending companies, has just made two new announcements that are quite interesting – but only if you’re 55 or older, because they just apply to you. 1% bonus interest for new lenders If you join Lending Works and offer…

Savers were given a new tax break in the Budget on Wednesday, but it wasn’t clear at the time whether that was going to extend to your P2P lending. Zopa has told us today that it just received confirmation from the Treasury that it does…

P2P lending company Funding Circle is now offering 20% off Virgin Train travel to people lending their money through its service. Funding Circle is the fifth largest net lender to businesses in the UK and it offers a low risk, market beating opportunity to individual…

With additional reporting by Matthew Howard. The Budget today contained several direct effects on peer-to-peer lending: No tax deducted automatically from savings Over the passed few months, the Treasury has been  umm-ing and ahh-ing over whether to ask P2P lending websites to automatically deduct basic-rate income tax…

We needed to fill a few gaps in Landbay’s data in our detailed comparison tables, so today I interviewed John Goodall, CEO. Landbay is one of the safest P2P lending websites, focusing on high-quality residential buy-to-let landlords and properties. It has clear, strict lines in…

Additional reporting by Neil Faulkner. Lending Works now allows lenders to receive their interest payments directly as a monthly income. This will start from 6 April, which is just in time for our next Lending Works pay checks. Lenders can also choose to receive a combination of interest…

Zopa, the oldest P2P lending company in the world – the one that started it all, right here in the UK – turned 10 today. Let’s look into how well it has contained losses, even during the worst recession for nearly a century, and how…

Unbolted now has a bad-debt provision fund to cover at least the first part of your lending losses. The fund will operate as a trust in the same way as the other P2P lending companies. The new pawnbroking P2P lending company already offers lenders protection…

Until recently, FundingSecure has been bragging that no lenders have lost any of their starting money. But it had to happen eventually. Now, a small number of lenders have collectively lost £512 of their starting money. Presumably all those lenders are up overall, because FundingSecure…

Lending Works has probably completed around 1,000 loans in over a year. Late payments are inevitable, as are bad debts, and yet,  despite the high number of loans, it has only just now got its first late payments. Today, late payments rose from zero to…

Additional reporting by Matthew Howard The University of Cambridge is making a reputation for itself in analysis of P2P lending and other “alternative finance”. It’s focus so far has really very much been on statistics that are of interest to the P2P lending companies, but unfortunately…

P2P lending company Unbolted, a pawnbroking offering that we wrote about in New Peer-to-Peer Pawnbroker: Unbolted, has now got off the ground with four small loans and one very large one. I’ll just summarise these loans now, so that you can get an idea of…