Assetz Capital smashes £40m milestone with exponential growth in loan and investor demand
Assetz Capital is the only platform to have recorded monthly growth of an average of 23 per cent for every month of Liberium’s AltFi Index since the index was launched to track the industry in September 2013.
Based on the past nine months of growth, the platform expects to hit a total of £100m of lending by the end of 2014 and to have exceeded £300m by the end of 2015.
Stuart Law, CEO of Assetz Capital, commented: “This level of growth is in line with our expectations, and we’re really pleased to have been able to achieve it using solely retail investor funding to date – a rarity in today’s market. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be in the industry, and there’s scope for further growth as we’re in discussions with institutional funders to bring even more loans to the retail investor market.”
When it launched in March 2013, Assetz Capital pioneered secured P2P lending by becoming the first provider to take tangible security on every loan in order to protect investors – this proved so successful that several other platforms have adopted a similar model.
Assetz Capital brought several further innovations into the market, including the development of an underwriting model which allows it to take on some of the industry’s largest loans. The platform developed this new model in order to allow investors willing to lend a significant sum, to earn a slightly higher return by ‘underwriting’ a loan – guaranteeing the borrower the funds and releasing the loan to the retail investor once the loan has drawn down so that investors get an immediate return on their cash.
This gives borrowers and individual lenders the confidence that loans are fully funded, and has helped Assetz Capital to fund some of the largest-ever P2P loans – including a £1.5m loan to fund a Nottingham student development which was at the time the largest P2P loan ever issued in the world in April 2013 (and has since repaid in full).
Assetz Capital also launched a bridging finance offering, and was the first P2P platform to do so, lending £9.2m across 11 loans, giving its lenders direct access to another source of higher than average returns. It also introduced buy to let mortgages in 2013 and will further expand on this shortly with a new product. Assetz Capital lenders are currently achieving a one year weighted average net return of 11.7% pa after fees and before tax.
- August 5, 2014