Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose money. This is a high-risk investment. You may not be able to access your money easily and are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong. Take 2 minutes to learn more.

The Assetz Capital platform is no longer open to investment from individual investors. No new investments into peer-to-peer loans are possible and, as a result, no new funds should be deposited. The existing loan book relating to the Retail platform is now in run-off and this will, over time, deliver the return of capital to investors. Full information can be found here . Existing Retail lenders can still log in, view information regarding their account and loan holdings and operate their account in accordance with the information regarding the run-off provided on the link above. Please see this important message regarding the currency of the information on the pages on this website.

Wealth and Finance interview: Part 1

Wealth and Finance interview: Part 1

 

What is Assetz Capital?

Assetz Capital is one of the leading peer-to-peer lenders in this newly regulated financial services sector. Founded in 2012, Assetz Capital is among a number of firms that are transforming the lending sector.

Peer-to-peer lenders, otherwise known as marketplace lenders, have evolved to help fill the gap in lending left by the retraction of banks from past activity levels following the credit crunch. Part of the alternative finance space, peer-to-peer lenders connect sources of capital - whether retail investors or institutions and funds - to creditworthy borrowers and manage the origination of loans, credit approval, and loan monitoring and servicing through to repayment.

Some peer-to-peer lenders operate in the consumer market, but Assetz Capital specialises in business lending. Our team has extensive credit skills and experience and our top-quality IT team is responsible for the award-winning website which allows investors to be able to participate in our loans.

 

What is your role as CEO?

My role as CEO is to drive strategic innovation, act as chief rainmaker for deal flow, help develop the team and oversee the integration of our two core functions of credit and technology.

Although we are a FinTech business, we place substantial emphasis on the financial element of this, considering the importance of credit quality to both us and our lenders.

Personally, I am a businessman and entrepreneur with well over 30 years’ experience in business and investment but nonetheless I am the one non-credit person in our highly experienced and broad management team. My job is to ask the silly questions that flush out business opportunities which can easily be missed if you are used to doing things a certain way, to ask the tough questions that others don’t want to ask but must be addressed to become a high-performance business and to help bring our team together to ensure our performance keeps improving over time.

This high performance revolves around our investors and borrowers, with our firm dedicated to ensuring that both are supported.  This is reflected in our mantra at Assetz Capital – “Fairer, Growth, Together”. 

 

What is your vision for Assetz Capital?

Everything that we do is aimed at growing an investor’s investments with us, at helping grow creditworthy businesses by providing them access to capital, and at growing people and their careers with us as they manage our investors and borrowers. This is achieved by us all working together fairly and effectively, sharing the value-add of our efficiencies to deliver higher returns to investors and lower cost finance to businesses, with us being efficient but profitable in the middle.

This is our vision for the company: a collaborative environment in which everyone works together to ensure that both our investors and borrowers are fully supported and the business is constantly performing to the best of its ability.

However, a vision is only as good as the communication skills of the leader with that vision; without communication a vision is like an unread book. Vision is firstly about having a view on the direction the world is taking, in terms of both the momentum and disruption that you foresee will have strong influence in the future.

In my experience, you start by gathering data and listening to as many experienced people as possible in related sectors and then form a view of the world as it is now and future versions of it. You must then decide on the most likely future form. You must have a view, or you cannot set a strategic direction. Secondly, vision is about seeing your place in this future world and looking back to the steps needed to take to get there. Somehow you must communicate the enormity of this change to your team and set out the series of steps necessary to get there. In the end most focus must be on the first steps, but without people knowing which point on the horizon they are heading towards they won’t know why they’re taking those first steps and won’t engage as well as possible. In the end your vision has become a strategic plan and then gets delivered through strategic execution. If your top team has not been part of the entire process, execution would be near impossible.

Therefore, at Assetz Capital we all dedicate a great deal of our time to communication and personal development. Internally we have a number of communication techniques and technologies and work collaboratively to achieve our vision.

 

As with most forms of investment, peer-to-peer lending carries a degree of risk to your capital; in this case, if borrowers were unable to repay their loans. At Assetz Capital, we seek to reduce this risk to our investors by taking asset security on every loan, with the added benefit of a discretionary Provision Fund for some of our investment accounts.

- January 22, 2016

Back to News Stories