Assetz Capital to resume lending within two weeks
After finishing funding the last of its coronavirus business interruption loan scheme (CBILS) pipeline, Assetz Capital has started originating new loans across the business and will resume retail lending within the next two weeks.
Stuart Law (pictured), chief executive of Assetz Capital, said the peer-to-peer lending platform has finished its CBILS lending and is now originating new loans across the whole business, for retail lenders, institutional investors and for those that will fit under the recovery loan scheme (RLS), once the platform is ready to lend under the it.
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“We had a lot of focus finishing the CBILS pipeline and that work is now done and we’re moving onto origination,” he said.
“Origination was paused while finishing CBILS lending but now it’s done we now have the funding lines in place for post-CBILS lending and originations have started across the business, including for retail. We expect lending to to back up in both the manual and access accounts in the next week or two.
“We’ll originate them and release the loans into the manual lending accounts at the same time as the access accounts.
Law highlighted that the platform is committed to retail investors and despite pausing retail lending last year, it still produced returns of around four per cent within the access accounts due to a large pool of loans behaving well and borrowers repaying.
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“We’re not abandoning retail, the message is the same, if retail want us to a decent degree we’ll absolutely originate for retail,” he said.
“If we don’t have a huge demand for retail and the market doesn’t want what we produce we will stop producing for them. The decision is in the hands of retail investors. We’re not changing our plan, we’re very happy to originate for retail.
“Whilst we were cautious about lending at the beginning of the cycle the reason we stopped giving retail investors loans was because retail investors were panicking and wanted to withdraw their money and effectively asked us to stop originating.
“They asked us to stop funding the loans, they wanted their money back. It’s quite a big machine to restart. Now we have net inflows coming into the platform.”
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