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About P2P Blog and the person writing it
I started this blog in July 2016. The Bank of England had just cut Bank Rate to 0.25 per cent, savings accounts were paying almost nothing, and a wave of UK peer to peer lending platforms were offering retail investors 5 to 12 per cent for lending against property, businesses and consumer loans. I was a contractor with a stocks and shares ISA, an interest in spreadsheets, and more curiosity than sense.
For three years I put real money through roughly twenty platforms, published monthly figures showing exactly what I was earning, wrote long reviews of the ones I used, and built tools to pull apart their loan books. The blog was read by a decent number of people, several platforms talked to me, and the numbers looked good right up until they did not.
What happened next
From 2018 onwards the sector came apart. Collateral collapsed in February 2018 after it turned out it had been operating on someone else's FCA permission. Lendy went into administration in May 2019. FundingSecure followed in October. MoneyThing wound down. Ablrate went the same way later. I had money in several of those, and the abruptness was the hard part. A platform can suspend withdrawals overnight, and once administrators are appointed the timetable stops being anything you have a say in.
The bigger names left in a quieter way. Zopa handed its lending book back and became a bank. RateSetter was sold to Metro Bank and closed its peer to peer business. Funding Circle, Assetz Capital, Landbay and Lending Works all shut retail investors out and kept lending with institutional money. By 2022 the retail sector was a fraction of its 2017 size, the blog had gone quiet, and I had stopped writing anything at all.
Why it is back
Two reasons.
The first is that the pages people still land on here are eleven-year-old reviews of platforms that no longer exist, with no indication anywhere on them that the company folded. Somebody searching "what happened to Lendy" deserves a better answer than a 2017 review of how good its dashboard was.
The second is that the sites ranking for these searches today are mostly paid by the platforms they cover. That model is legal and it is disclosed, and it also means almost nobody writing about UK peer to peer lending has any commercial reason to tell you not to bother. I do not have that problem, because no platform pays this site anything.
What I am and what I am not
I am not a financial adviser, not an analyst, and not qualified to tell you what to do with your money. What I have is three years of doing this with my own savings, several years of watching the aftermath, and a habit of reading the documents.
The platform pages here are built from public information: the platform's own site, its FCA register entry, its filed accounts, administrators' reports where there are any. Where I have not held an account, the page says so. Every page carries the date its sources were last read, because a rate or a minimum investment without a date attached is worthless.
The rules I write to
- No lending platform pays this site anything, ever.
- Nothing from the 2016 to 2019 archive is republished as it stood. Pages are rewritten or replaced.
- A platform that has closed keeps its old URL, and the page says what happened to it.
- Every figure is read off its source by hand, with the date recorded.
- Corrections get made, and the page shows when it was last updated.
If something here is wrong, tell me.