Kuflink reveals ambitious plans for 2023
Kuflink has been on a major growth trajectory over the past few years. It has grown to become one of the largest peer-to-peer lending platforms in the UK, with more than £238m loaned.
Recently, the property lender revealed that it almost doubled its profits in 2022. In fact, the platform has achieved profitability every month since August 2021.
But chief executive Narinder Khattoare and head of products Paul Auger (pictured) have even bigger things planned for 2023.
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This year, Kuflink is on track to make a profit in excess of £1m while increasing its turnover from £10m to £15m. Khattoare believes that the platform’s loan book will “definitely” reach £300m this year, making Kuflink one of a handful of P2P platforms to break the £300m milestone.
“This year is going to be a fantastic year for us as a business and I think we will excel and do over and above what our forecast says,” says Khattoare.
“People here are motivated and it’s great to see people coming into the office and coming in with a smile on their face.”
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“The company has some very aggressive growth plans over the next two to three years,” adds Auger. “We want to be bigger not just in the bridging space but in the lending space as a whole.”
This means launching a slew of new consumer and commercial products, hiring new staff, bringing on new institutional funding lines, and ramping up its retail investor base.
“We’re looking to enhance the products that we do on the bridging side and introduce second-charge lending both on the commercial side and the consumer side,” says Auger.
“It’s a growing business but we’re still agile enough and entrepreneurial enough to be able to change quite quickly in response to the marketplace.”
For example, after Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget in late 2022, Kuflink was able to act instantly to change the dynamics of its products to protect the business and its investors. The platform had just begun to offer buy-to-let mortgages for the first time, but the chaos that followed the mini-budget meant that this plan was placed on the back burner.
“Whenever there is a major fiscal announcement, we don’t wait – we will hold a meeting very quickly to discuss whether we need to make any changes,” explains Khattoare. This agility means that Kuflink can always act in the best interests of its investors, no matter what is happening with the wider economy.
Auger predicts that the economy will start to turn around from April 2023, but both he and Khattoare agree that despite the current economic hardships, they are feeling confident about Kuflink’s future.
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“There’s a lot more stability now and we’ve seen rates coming down even though there was another base rate increase in December,” says Auger. “It may be a turbulent 2023 and 2024 but over the next 10 years, times will get easier.”
In the meantime, Khattoare and Auger are building a business that will last, with plans to become a full-spectrum financial services company with a range of lending products and a vast network of investors.
“We’re not just building our business for today,” says Auger. “The ground work has to be put in.”
For Kuflink, the ground work is well underway, and 2023 will be the year that the platform shows what it is truly capable of.