UK property p2p lending marketplace Funding Secure was placed in administration today, Oct. 23rd, 2019. Jonathan Avery-Gee, Edward Avery-Gee and Daniel Richardson of CG & Co were appointed Administrators of the Company. No deposits and withdrawal requests from investors are currently processed anymore. More detailed information is provided in this FAQ.
Funding Secure provided roughly 315M GBP funding, mostly for property development loans, but also for pawn loans. The outstanding loan book stands at approximately 80M GBP. The accumulated loan book represents approximately 486 loans from about 3,500 investors.
The FCA has issued a statement on this page.
This is the 3rd failure of a British property p2p lending marketplace following the earlier demise of the platforms Collateral and Lendy.
What do you think was the reason they failed? Why are the failures concentrated in the UK?
Hi,
thank you for your questions.
re 1) The details on Funding Secure are not yet know, so the following is just speculation. Default level was too high, that led to investors increasingly unwilling to fund new loans. (for the last months my records show new loan volume was below 3M GBP/month, sometimes littly more than 1M GBP/month.) That means the platform did not make much revenue from fees. Still they have ongoing staff / IT costs.
re 2) That is much harder to answer. Clearly there are problems in the UK platform approach to financing development finance. Aspects could be too much risk taking, too high valuations. In two cases there was intervention by the regulator too.