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®…
FundingSecure is a peer-to-peer lending company has been lending your money while securing it against valuable items, such as power boats and mansions. Interest rates have been close to 13%, on average, but no lender has lost any money on loans gone bad. FundingSecure has three outstanding…
If you lent your money for five years in 2014, you probably got richer. If you started lending for fives in the safer, lower-rate P2P lending companies last year, you should have made at least 4% and it wouldn’t have been much trouble to make around…
I want to show you how different savings and investments did in the year just gone by. I’ve not cherry-picked this information to make peer-to-peer lending look good. I’ve looked for precisely the information that I want to know when doing a serious comparison of savings accounts…
Peer-to-peer lending companies get very high customer satisfaction ratings in surveys. Here, we collate some of the comments from their lender customers. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to negative comments! So we have to view the few comments selected by the P2P lending companies with…
While eyes have been focused on the upcoming P2P ISAs (tax-free lending), individuals lending through peer-to-peer have been able to lend tax-free in pensions for six months already. The latest peer-to-peer lending company to allow lenders to lend through a pension is rebuildingsociety. The higher-risk, higher-potential return…
It’s like when your say that a piece of art looks beautiful while the man at your side shakes his head in disgust. You’re both entitled to your opinions. Similarly, there are no regulations that define what an A+ loan is, or an A, or any other loan…
Here are the latest high-rate loans that are open for you to bid on from rebuildingsociety, the P2P lending company that finances riskier loans to businesses. Lending on rebuildingsociety over the next ten days could give you a pre-bad debt interest rate of 16% to…
Sorry that we missed this somehow, especially since I’m a Lending Works member: its bad-debt provision fund has got better from 1 January. The worst bit is that I was sort of told this by someone working there in December. Anyway… Here’s the situation: Lending…
Zopa, the oldest peer-to-peer lending company in the world, has increased its interest rates to 5.1% and 4%, but, at the same time, it has removed its rate promise. Zopa’s rate promise has been assuring lenders for over a year now that they will get…
Unbolted has just launched. It is the newest peer-to-peer lending company to focus on pawnbroking. The company is regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and backed by early investors in Ocado. It is currently not accepting new lenders. It is not unusual for brand new P2P lending…
Expected interest rate of 10% to lenders before bad debts. You can lend as little as £1. Assetz Capital has just released some details of its new business invoice lending venture. The P2P lending company already does business loans, as well as short-term and developer property…
AltFi predicts that we will collectively lend close to £3 billion to people and businesses in 2015. That’s twice as much as in 2014. The introduction of tax-free lending through new P2P ISAs might help boost lending even further. Lenders using RateSetter, Funding Circle and…
A common theme in all today’s peer-to-peer lending news articles and blogs on 4thWay has been the see-saw effect: more borrowers make it easier for lenders to lend at better rates while borrowers have to pay more. This encourages more lenders to come, which makes…
