Kuflink aims to reach £300m by June 2023
Kuflink is on course to reach its £300m lending milestone by June 2023 – just a year after it hit the £200m mark.
It took the peer-to-peer lending platform almost five years to reach its £100m lending milestone, and another 17 months to reach £200m, demonstrating the pace of growth at the firm. However, for Narinder Khattoare, chief executive of Kuflink, the milestones haven’t been coming quickly enough.
“From a business perspective, I don’t think the £200m milestone was hit as quickly as it should have been,” he said. “We’ve had to get through the Covid and lockdown period which was a struggle for most businesses but a blessing for some, as it allowed them to streamline their business and reset for them to achieve a different goal.
“We were able to get into development loans before the hike in costs for builds, as many were sitting on materials which were bought at a good price before everything went through the roof.”
Since the start of the year, Kuflink has been in high-growth mode, working on a raft of innovative new products and services, as well as expanding its team.
“With the number of products we have and will bring to market, we should probably reach £300m before next June,” says Khattoare. “We have grown our team with a few senior hires which we will announce in due course to get the Kuflink brand even more prominent amongst the intermediary community.”
At the moment, Kuflink’s investors are particularly interested in the platform’s mezzanine loans. These are offered with a higher loan-to-value of 80-85 per cent, with a premium that is passed on to the investor. These mezzanine loans always sit behind Kuflink’s own senior loan, which means that the platform can maintain control.
More recently, Kuflink has introduced a suite of buy-to-let (BTL) products which have been popular with borrowers.
“We are starting to get more enquiries in but we will only do the loans which we feel are right for us and our investors,” Khattoare said. “At present it is too early to comment on what our investors see as a good product or not. “Investors have been earning good rates from us, although some would say not high enough.
We believe these rates are realistic in the current climate. We’ve never been able to pass on double digits to our investors as we don’t earn as big a margin as other platforms. This is because our focus is on less risky projects, meaning the rate of interest we charge is competitive so that is reflected in our offering.”
Investors in the platform’s BTL products are currently earning between 2.5 and three per cent, depending on the risk profile of the borrower.
“This will be an educational process for investors as they are used to earning higher interest,” Khattoare added. “Our product will be paying monthly interest in our BTL pool unlike our other pool.”
Kuflink may not be delivering double digits, but it has maintained its track record of zero investor losses, even as it expands its product offering and onboards more borrowers. With more product launches on the horizon, and a number of new hires set to be announced soon, the property lender is going from strength to strength, one milestone at a time.