UK P2P volumes increased by 120pc last year
UK-based peer-to-peer lenders saw their lending volumes soar by 120 per cent in 2021, year-on-year; representing a 40 per cent increase on pre-pandemic loan volumes.
According to new data from Innovate Finance’s 36H Group, P2P loan volumes fell by approximately 40 per cent in 2020 vs 2019, before rebounding strongly in 2021.
“The fall in volume in 2020 was unsurprising given that most lenders paused or slowed lending in the second quarter of 2020 while the potential economic impact of the pandemic was being assessed,” said Mike Carter, head of platform lending and 36H Group at Innovate Finance.
“However, our data also shows the sector re-started lending in the second half of 2020 and bounced back strongly in 2021.
“The 2021 performance shows that P2P platforms are stronger now than pre-pandemic.”
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The 36H Group also published a table of the top 10 platforms in the P2P sector for 2021, noting that the absence of Zopa and Funding Circle had created a new hierarchy.
Assetz Capital was the top platform in terms of loan book value, with more than £1.4bn in loans. Folk2Folk was next on the list, with cumulative lending of £502m, and CrowdProperty was third with £177m.
CrowdProperty was singled out as one of the few platforms to grow its loan volumes in both 2020 and 2021, with lending volumes approximately 150 per cent higher in 2021 than they were in 2019.
Stuart Law, founder and chief executive of Assetz Capital, said that being the largest lending platform with P2P funding is “only part of the story”.
“We fund at least one in 12 of all new homes built by small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) housebuilders, and intend to grow this still further.
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“Our funding also supports substantial job creation in the SME community and the development and ownership of care facilities and as a result we are having a greater and greater positive impact on the economy and wider society as each year passes “
Roy Warren, managing director of Folk2Folk, said that the P2P sector has a “tremendous amount of value to offer businesses and investor”.
Meanwhile Mike Bristow, co-founder and chief executive of CrowdProperty, said: “Our business model of diverse sources of capital providing specialist development finance for SME property developers proved perfectly reliable through the pandemic when many traditional sources of finance that had single wholesale funding sources paused.
“Our highly scalable technology and deep asset-class expertise delivers the disruptive speed, ease, certainty, transparency and expertise of finance that developers crave to help them succeed, unlocking their potential to build much needed, under-supplied homes, drive spend in the UK economy and grow their businesses quicker and more profitably.”
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