LendingCrowd launches P2P investor insentive

By investing £5000, investors will get a 2.5 per cent joining bonus allocated to their accounts and access to a lending platform that achieved an 8.1 per cent rate of return over the last twelve months.

Since launching in 2014, the alternative finance lender to the SME market has facilitated loans totalling over £7 million and already has over 2000 investors.

It lends mainly to SMEs, with loans tending to be in the £250,000 and below bracket.

Chief executive and co-founder Stuart Lunn said the offer was being made both to raise awareness of peer-to-peer lending as a source of alternative finance and to boost the number of investors LendingCrowd has on its site.

Deals range in size from £20,000 to over £1 million, and in 2015 LendingCrowd helped Diet Chef complete one of the biggest ever peer-to-business deals seen in the UK in a £1.5 million debt finance transaction.

LendingCrowd said it only lends to creditworthy businesses using similar criteria to the high street banks and assesses every loan on a case-by-case basis through its credit assessment team run by Ian Cunningham, a former head of corporate and commercial credit at RBS

Because capital is at risk in common with the rest of the P2P market, the platform encourages investors to help diversify their risk by spreading investments over a number of loans of which there are currently 70 available.

CEO and co-founder, Stuart Lunn, said: “The platform has achieved a great rate of return over the last year, with numbers that compare very favourably to other P2P lenders in the UK and internationally. Our investor base is telling us that as well as being happy taking on risk to achieve a rate of return that beats most other investments, there is a real satisfaction level involved in the process of supporting the growth of some of our most exciting SMEs.”