Assetz Capital, one of the UK’s largest P2P lending platforms with over £400 million lent out, have launched their IF ISA (Innovative Finance ISA). They are giving access to the same investment products offered to non-ISA accounts:

You can now invest in all of our automatic accounts tax-free, with investment into the Manual Lending Account (MLA) using your ISA allowance available in Q1 2018.

For me, Assetz Capital are unique for the breadth of their investment options: both manual and automated. Very recently they dropped the interest rate on their main automated product, the GBBA, from 7% to 6.25%. They did this by closing off the original ‘series 1’ product and opening up a ‘sereis 2’ with new loans. The argument was this would allow a greater volume of lower risk/interest loans to qualify for the account, which now makes perfect sense as the ISA money is coming.

In the general secured business loan market, we have targeted slightly lower risk and priced transactions and as a result have had to pass on slightly lower interest rates in order to compete effectively in the marketplace – this has cut off loan flow into the GBBA at its current 7% gross target payable rate.

Investments into the GEA (the green energy version of the GBBA) have been paused, but they may open it up again at the original 7% return. From what I remember, this had a lower loan diversity than the GBBA, so it might be worth a closer look at the loans before jumping all in at the higher return once/if they reopen it!

I’ve written more about Assetz Capital in this review, though I need to update this with the latest rate changes.

The IF ISA Market

Funding Circle are rolling out the IFISA in stages, Zopa have released theirs in a controlled manner, and RateSetter are targetting a Q1 release of theirs. So it’s looking like all the biggest players will have IF ISA’s available for the tax year cut-off this April.