P2PFA reports growth in new lending as LendInvest departs
CUMULATIVE lending among the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association (P2PFA) members in the second quarter of 2017 fell slightly to £8.39bn, due to LendInvest’s departure from the trade body.
However, new lending among the members has still grown significantly year on year, the P2PFA said on Friday.
“Comparing the performance of P2PFA platforms in the second quarter in 2017 with the same period in 2016 underscores the progress which peer-to-peer lending has continued to make: levels of new lending in the same quarter last year were £657,939,000, whereas this year our platforms have originated £818,919,129 in the last three months – of which £478,203,444 has supported small business and real estate projects,” said Robert Pettigrew, director of the P2PFA.
“The number of lenders and borrowers continues to rise, with more than 35,000 more investors participating than during the same period last year.”
Read more: P2PFA members lent out more than £1bn in first quarter
The eight remaining P2P member platforms – Zopa, RateSetter, Funding Circle, Landbay, Lending Works, MarketInvoice, ThinCats and this year’s addition Folk2Folk – collectively represent more than 80 per cent of the UK market.
The number of investors in P2PFA member-platforms has now hit 185,652, the trade body said, while the number of current borrowers has risen to 435,267.
Read more: Interview with P2PFA chair Christine Farnish
395,296 of these borrowers are individuals, while the remaining 39,971 are businesses.
It recently emerged that specialist mortgage lender LendInvest had withdrawn its P2P authorisation application and stopped accepting retail money to its platform.
Read more: LendInvest to return to retail market with new bond issue
“Following LendInvest’s decision that it has no short or medium-term plans to add an Article 36(H) regulated platform to its investment offering, communication of the platform’s intention to withdraw from the P2PFA with immediate effect was received,” said the P2PFA.
The association’s figures also confirmed that P2P business lender Funding Circle has overtaken Zopa in terms of cumulative lending, at £2.46bn versus £2.4bn respectively. Landbay has done the least lending out of the platforms, at £46.4m, followed by Lending Works at £58.4m.
Earlier this month, the P2PFA announced that it had added eight members through the launch of its associate membership scheme.
The new members are not P2P lenders themselves, but they provide a range of support services to the sector. They comprise law firms Simmons and Simmons, TLT and Fox Williams, global information solutions company Equifax, data firm Alterest, accountancy firm Grant Thornton, Altus Consulting and P2P research firm Orca Money.