Assetz Capital smashes £50m milestone with exponential growth in loan and investor demand
Following record lending volumes in excess of £40m in 2014 alone, peer-to-peer lender Assetz Capital has now lent more than £50m to UK SMEs and property developers, and has redesigned its platform in order to make P2P lending more accessible.
Since the start of 2014, Assetz Capital’s lending volumes have risen by around 15 per cent each month on average. Based on growth to date, the platform expects to hit approaching £100m of lending by the end of 2014 and to have exceeded £300m by the end of 2015.
In order to make peer-to-peer lending more accessible, Assetz Capital has completely redesigned its platform, allowing investors to choose from several investment accounts which invest money automatically in P2P loans which match certain criteria. Meanwhile, experienced investors can continue to hand pick specific loans, with precise control over which loans they invest in.
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 this milestone using solely retail investor funding to date – a rarity in today’s market where institutional money is also keen to benefit from our high quality loan origination and healthy interest rates.
“The growth in lending volumes and investor numbers reflects the fact that P2P lending is increasingly attracting a retail audience – ordinary investors who are disillusioned with the low rates they’d get elsewhere. As the lending process becomes simpler and less time-consuming, we believe that investors will take advantage of P2P in even greater numbers.”
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 as it helps prevent loan defaults becoming serious losses due to the security providing an opportunity to repay the loan in full.
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 fee by ‘underwriting’ a loan – guaranteeing the borrower the funds and releasing the loan for the retail investor to invest in 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, with interest).
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.
Loans listed on the platform as at 16 October 2014 were offering interest rates between 9 and 18 per cent p/a before any allowances for defaults and taxes.
- October 16, 2014