Loanpad

arsenepenguin

Has anyone had any dealings with loanpad, they are currently offering 4.9% on savings up to a million pounds with a 60 day access premium account. 

ForumUser7

I don’t believe they are FSCS protected, as they do not come up on the FSCS checker.

Additionally, their website states ‘Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose money. This is a high-risk investment. You may not be able to access your money easily and are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong’.

Personally, I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole

ColdIron

Loan pad is not a deposit savings account such as banks offer, it's a peer to peer lender

You should read the Risk Summary

• The P2P platform could fail
• If the platform fails, it may be impossible for you to collect money on your loan. It could take years to get your money back, or you may not get it back at all. Even if the platform has plans in place to prevent this, they may not work in a disorderly failure.

https://www.loanpad.com/#risk-notice

pafpcg

My partner and I have had accounts with Loanpad containing several thousand pounds each for a couple of years - we've been happy with the service and the relative stability of the platform. 

On the P2P Independent Forum (https://p2pindependentforum.com), Loanpad has a reputation for being one of the less-risky P2P platforms.  But don't invest if you have any concerns, especially if you would be "inconvenienced" by losing access to any funds - in my opinion, it's only suitable for people with substantial investments elsewhere and looking to diversify into high-interest accounts.  Compare P2P with other non-FSCS-covered investments such as stocks and shares where the potential for capital loss is balanced by higher yields. 

Albermarle

As above, Loanpad has one of the better reputations for P2 P lenders. However you have to tie up your money for some years, and there is a risk it could all go wrong. 
As you can tie up your money in a fixed rate savings account with no risk and get >4% , then 4.9% does not look very attractive. Less than 1% risk premium.

brucefan_2

I have a small amount of money on the Loanpad platform.

There is a risk that everything could go wrong. The lower interest rates in comparison with other P2P platforms reflects the lower risk which many ascribe to Loanpad.

There are two accounts available:

Classic, which has 'daily access'
Premium, which is 60 days' notice (if memory serves me well).

I only have funds in a Premium Account (within an IFISA) and interest is paid daily.

Cash balances can be auto-withdrawn off the platform, if you so wish.

My own experiences to date have been positive but my 'investmen' is fairly modest.

Hope that helps.

David

Malthusian

The disconnect between the regulator-mandated risk warning "You could lose the money you invest... Many peer-to-peer (P2P) loans are made to borrowers who can’t borrow money from traditional lenders such as banks. These borrowers have a higher risk of not paying you back" and all the promotional material "daily interest... daily access... £0 Capital Losses to date" is positively schizophrenic.
If I value daily access to my money then why would I want to loan my money to property developers no-one has ever heard of for up to 2 years? Does not compute.
Who cares about "daily interest" anyway? What's wrong with paying interest monthly like everybody else? How many people with enough money to consider Loanpad survive hand-to-mouth on a day-to-day basis? 
That "£0 Capital Losses to date" is not accompanied by a "past performance is no guide to the future" warning, which the FCA has explicitly identified as misleading.

Sea_Shell

I have a thread here, if you fancy a read...


https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6308592/loanpad-p2p-reviews-experiences-info-or-updates-post-them-here-im-having-a-dabble

Sea_Shell

Albermarle said:

As above, Loanpad has one of the better reputations for P2 P lenders. However you have to tie up your money for some years, and there is a risk it could all go wrong. 
As you can tie up your money in a fixed rate savings account with no risk and get >4% , then 4.9% does not look very attractive. Less than 1% risk premium.

Did you mean the BiB?

Your money isn't tied up for years.  60 days max.   

Well, unless it goes wrong, due to liquidity or platform failure 😉

Albermarle

Sea_Shell said:

Albermarle said:

As above, Loanpad has one of the better reputations for P2 P lenders. However you have to tie up your money for some years, and there is a risk it could all go wrong. 
As you can tie up your money in a fixed rate savings account with no risk and get >4% , then 4.9% does not look very attractive. Less than 1% risk premium.

Did you mean the BiB?

Your money isn't tied up for years.  60 days max.   

Well, unless it goes wrong, due to liquidity or platform failure 😉

Probably need to reword my comments as follows.

When all is going well, you can have easyish access to your funds. However even if things do not go badly wrong, they can gate the accounts for an unspecified period of time, to stop a run of withdrawals. This has to happen, otherwise the funds available for the property developers dries up mid stream, and then you have a bigger problem.
This is what has happened to Assetz Capital, another P2P site with quite a good reputation. The fact that safe savings accounts went from 1 % to 4%+, meant that lending to them was not attractive anymore, even though otherwise they were going OK, and money was being withdrawn from them quicker than they could cope with. So for the security of lenders and borrowers, they have stopped further withdrawals from the 'easy access' accounts for the time being.

Sea_Shell

Yes, liquidity can dry up and withdrawals can be paused to enable more loan repayments to complete.

So if there was a "run" on the platform, then you may have to wait longer.

If managed properly, in theory, a platform should be able to unwind in an orderly manner, just in reverse from originally gaining investers and borrowers.