Guide
Why P2P cashback and refer a friend offers disappeared
Between 2016 and 2019 you could earn several hundred pounds simply by opening accounts. Platforms paid 50 to 100 pounds for a first investment, sometimes more, and paid both sides of a refer-a-friend introduction. This blog tracked those offers, and a fair amount of its early traffic came from people looking for them.
They are gone, and they are not coming back.
What changed
In August 2022 the FCA published its rules on the marketing of high risk investments, PS22/10, which took effect through COBS 4.12A from 1 February 2023. Peer to peer agreements were classified as Restricted Mass Market Investments, and the rules that came with that classification did several things at once:
- Banned incentives to invest. Firms may no longer offer cash, bonuses, discounts or refer-a-friend rewards to retail investors as an inducement to invest. That is the specific provision that ended the cashback era.
- Required a prescribed risk warning. The wording at the top of every page on this site is the wording firms must use.
- Required investors to categorise themselves as restricted, high net worth or sophisticated, with a cooling-off period before a first investment.
- Required an appropriateness test. A genuine one, which you can fail.
The FCA followed up in 2024 with FG24/1, guidance aimed squarely at affiliates and social media promotion, and interviewed a number of people under caution that October. The direction of travel is not subtle.
Why the rules exist
Because the offers worked, on exactly the people they should not have.
A hundred pounds of cashback on a five hundred pound minimum investment is a 20 per cent return before you have thought about anything. It is an extremely effective way of getting somebody to open an account on a platform they have not researched, in a product they do not understand, and the platforms competing hardest on cashback were disproportionately the ones with the most trouble raising money any other way.
Several of the platforms offering the largest incentives in 2017 and 2018 are in the closed platforms section now. That is not a coincidence. Paying to acquire lenders is what a business does when it needs funding more than it needs good lenders.
What replaced them
Nothing, for retail investors, and that is the point. There is no legitimate UK platform paying you to sign up in 2026. If you find one offering it, that is a reason to look harder at the firm, not a reason to take the money.
Cashback still exists in categories that are not investments: current accounts, credit cards, switching offers. Those are covered by different rules and are not what this site is about.
What this means for a site like this one
The old business model of this blog, and of most sites writing about peer to peer lending, was commission on sign-ups. That model is now either prohibited or requires an approved financial promotion, which since February 2024 generally means the platform has to have written the promotion itself.
This site took the other route and stopped taking platform money altogether. How this site makes money sets out where the income does come from. The short version is a referral code for a registered office address service, which has nothing to do with investments at all.