If courage is grace under pressure, as the American writer Ernest Hemingway put it, then now is the time to demonstrate some pluck. It took a while, but the fallout from the problems of Lending Club, the flagship for peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in the US, has started to rumble through the media.
What happens to our US cohorts has considerable impact on the UK P2P sector. Some of the commentary has been shrill. But Anil Stocker of Market Invoice, a fellow P2P player with a somewhat different business model from Money&Co.’s, is a voice of calm and reason.
He argues in CityA.M. that the effects of the Lending Club problems are being exaggerated, and that P2P is here to stay: “Commentators have been quick to discredit the P2P sector, with online lenders labelled “banks in disguise”, up to the same old tricks as the incumbents they seek to disrupt.
But if one car has an accident, it doesn’t mean we all go back to the horse and cart. The coach makers might cry out to ban the car, but driving is still a faster, more secure way of getting around. The same is true of finance – borrowers don’t want to go back to the banks. Online lenders have already changed how people and businesses access money.”
The full article is available here.
We have a series of new loans in our pipeline. To find out more about our business methods, which include requiring borrowers to have a string track record of profitability, no other debt, and to give is a legal charge on the assets of the business, see our Lend page and Frequently Asked Questions.