Peer-to-peer lending sites: MSE guide discussion

That is good you got your FISA open at Ablrate, I am just transfering re-payments across to the ISA as they come in and the transfer for this on the site works well.

I have been putting into the property loans on Collateral, thankfully so far they have been going ok, I would prefer more bling to balance property out, but they seem to be a platform that is trusted so hopefully the developments work out.

The P2P forum is very indepth so it is always good to read opinions before investing in each loan as well.

Hopefully next week more new loans will be on Ablrate.

PeakOwl wrote: »

Presumably a move to make them more compliant with the FCA/HMRC and ready them for their IFISA launch...?

To the best of my knowledge there is absolutely nothing within FCA rules, or the rules on Innovative ISAs, that requires or even favours the "black box" approach of Ratesetter/Zopa over the "pick your own" approach of Lendy, MoneyThing et al.

I imagine they are going down that road for the same reason Zopa and Ratesetter and all the others did - they don't want to appear in the Daily Mail when there are mass defaults and the punters who put all their money into whatever had the highest headline rate complain that they shouldn't have been allowed to do it.

I am glad I pulled out of Funding Circle. I still have £60 frozen in defaults, but out with a small profit and another £40 frozen with problems lent. So £100. I just log in to see if any funds is there now and then. I withdrew a couple of pounds that appeared in interest recently, just to get it out

I have been putting some funds to Assetz Capital recently and much prefer them so far over funding circle for my hands off part of my P2P.

PatrickB wrote: »

For the past few years I've only been using Funding Circle (having started off with Zopa and RateSetter as well) and I get around 7.5% after defaults and all their charges, which I'm pretty happy with. But I am active daily in maintaining my account... part of the 20% of their lenders who do active lending rather than the 80% who don't.
With today's announcement I'm considering gradually withdrawing funds as they mature and reinvesting elsewhere. May I ask for people's recommendations please?

Patrick, are you looking to continue manually selecting loans?? If so, I think it's worth checking out ArchOver - 7 to 9% p.a & £75 refer a friend bonus; and LendingCrowd - 6% target, IF ISA available, £150 cashback bonus. Both allow you to actively manage. Another option could be Assetz Capital, which has multiple account options, ranging from early access auto-diversified to manual loan selection.

The FC announcement alongside RateSetter news in recent weeks has caused a bit of a stir in the industry!

Having initially been an enthusiastic user of LendingCrowd, I would now not recommend them to anyone, even with a 6% cashback bonus. Check out the discussion over at p2pindependentforum, where you can find similarly disgruntled lenders.