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UK P2P platforms that closed, and what investors got back
Between 2018 and 2022 the UK retail peer to peer sector went from roughly a hundred platforms to a few dozen. Some collapsed into administration. Others closed in an orderly way and paid everyone back. The largest simply stopped taking retail money and carried on lending with institutional funding, which from a retail lender's point of view amounted to the same thing.
This section is one page per platform: when it stopped, what it said at the time, what actually happened, and what lenders recovered.
Why these pages exist at all
Three reasons.
People are still looking. Searches for "what happened to Lendy", "FundingSecure administration update" and "is Collateral getting anything back" have not stopped, years later, and the answers are scattered across forum threads and administrators' PDFs.
The old URLs are still linked. This blog reviewed most of these platforms while they were trading. Those pages still collect links and traffic, and the worst possible thing to serve someone arriving on one is a 2017 review with no indication the company folded. So each old review URL keeps working and becomes the page about what happened to it.
Failures teach more than successes. Every one of these has a story where the warning signs were visible and people, including me, talked themselves out of them. Concentration in a handful of borrowers. Valuations that only worked if the development finished. A secondary market that made everything look liquid until it did not. An operating company losing money on every loan it wrote.
The four ways a platform ended
Administration. Collateral in February 2018, Lendy in May 2019, FundingSecure in October 2019. Lenders became creditors in a process they had no control over, recovery took years, and the administrators' costs came out of the same pot.
Solvent wind-down. MoneyThing, Growth Street, and others that stopped lending and worked the existing book out. Better than administration, still slow, and the recoveries depended entirely on how good the underlying loans were.
Retail exit. Zopa, RateSetter, Funding Circle, Assetz Capital, Landbay, Lending Works. The business survived, in some cases very successfully, and retail lenders were repaid or transferred out. The lending continued with institutional money.
Acquisition or pivot. Some platforms were bought and their retail arms closed as part of the deal.
Which of those happened to a given platform is the single most useful thing to know about it, and it is the first line of every page in this section.
How these pages are researched
Companies House filings, administrators' progress reports, FCA register history, the platform's own statements at the time, and contemporary reporting. Where I had money on a platform, the page says so. Where I did not, it says that too.
If you were a lender on one of these and have something the public record does not, get in touch. First-hand accounts of a wind-down are the hardest part of this to research and the most useful part to read.
Platforms that closed
These histories are being written one at a time. Each one needs the administrators' reports read before it goes up.