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Compare UK P2P lending platforms
The table at the foot of this page compares the platforms profiled on this site, as each profile is written, on the handful of things that are actually comparable: what they lend on, whether the loans are secured, the minimum you can put in, whether they offer an Innovative Finance ISA, and their firm reference number on the FCA register.
What the comparison deliberately leaves out
Rates. Every platform advertises a target, none of them promises it, and the number is not comparable between a first-charge bridging loan and an unsecured business loan. Advertised targets appear on the individual platform pages, worded as the platform words them, with the date read. Putting them in a sortable column would invite exactly the comparison they cannot support.
Scores and rankings. There is no "best platform" column and there never will be. Ranking financial products is what a site does when somebody is paying it per sign-up, and nobody pays this one.
Default rates. Platforms calculate these in incompatible ways, and the number that matters is not the default rate but the eventual loss after recovery, which most of them do not publish and which takes years to know. Where a platform publishes something meaningful, it is on its own page with the caveats attached.
How to actually compare two platforms
The differences that decided who lost money last time were not on any comparison table:
- What happens if the platform fails. Every authorised firm has to have a wind-down plan. Read what the platform says about who services the loans if it stops trading, and whether client money and loan contracts are held separately from the operating company. Collateral's investors found out the hard way what "the platform went under" can mean.
- What the security is really worth. A loan at 65 per cent of a valuation is only conservative if the valuation was. Look at who valued it, on what basis, and what the platform's recovered sales have actually achieved against valuation.
- How you get out. A secondary market only works while there are buyers, and the moment everybody wants out is the moment there are none. Treat any exit route that depends on another lender buying your loan as unavailable in the scenario where you most want it.
- Concentration. How much of the loan book is with one borrower or one developer. Several failures came down to a handful of connected borrowers.
- Whether the accounts stack up. The operating company files accounts at Companies House. A platform losing money on every loan it writes has to fix that somehow.
The table is a filter for which two or three platforms to read about properly. It is not a shortlist and it is not a recommendation.
Side by side
The comparison fills in as each platform profile is written and its figures are read off the platform's own site.