Funding Circle scraps downloadable loanbook
FUNDING Circle has withdrawn its downloadable loanbook and stopped publishing loan performance data on a daily basis.
The peer-to-peer business lender announced on Thursday that it has launched a new statistics page which will be updated every three months.
The changes mean that retail investors will no longer be able to access Funding Circle’s full loanbook. The London-headquartered firm attributed the decision to a decreasing number of customers downloading the data.
“While the loanbook was a useful resource for early-investors lending through Funding Circle, as the platform has grown and become popular with a broader group of investors, the number of people downloading it has fallen significantly,” said the firm in a blog post on its website.
“For example, approximately only 0.3 per cent of investors downloaded the loanbook in the last month. It’s important that you are still able to access loan-by-loan information on the businesses you are lending to, which you can download from your Funding Circle account.”
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The new statistics page will include information on lending, returns and the businesses borrowing from the platform, Funding Circle said.
The platform also announced that it has partnered with analytics firm AltFi Data who will provide independent verification of its quarterly loan information.
As a member of the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association (P2PFA), Funding Circle was mandated to allow investors to download its loanbook, until the self-regulated trade body amended its rules on Monday.
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The P2PFA said that members can “either continue to publish their entire loanbook, or provide a detailed breakdown of loans in their overall loanbook to enable a consumer to be informed about the nature and number of loans of different descriptions presently originated through the platform according to standards to be approved by the P2PFA board.”
It went on to say that the loanbooks of the largest platforms “are now of such a magnitude that their continued accessibility for a large number of investors is of questionable value”.
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