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The report ‘Pushing Boundaries – The 2015 UK Alternative Finance Report‘ by Nesta and the University of Cambridge collected very interesting and comprehensive data on the market development by polling 94 marketplaces. The report looks at alternative finance, including p2p lending, crowdfunding (equity/reward/donation-based), invoice trading, community shares, pension-led funding and debt-based securities.

P2P Consumer Lending

The total loan volume in 2015 was 909 million GBP, an increase of 66% compared to 2014. This is the sum of loans made to about 213,000 individual borrowers. A very high percentage (89%) of the investors used autoinvest features of the marketplaces to make the investments. 32% of p2p consumer lending was financed by institutional investors.

P2P Business Lending

This segment nearly doubled compared to the previous year to now 1.49 million GBP. An important factor are real estate related loans (609M GBP). There is a wide and partly complex range of loan types and terms.

The non real estate related loans compromise about 10,000 loans to SMEs. In this sector 42% of investors use autoinvest functionalities.

Depending on which data source is used for comparision p2p lending marketplaces in 2014 have gained a market share of 3.3% to 13.9% of all loans made to SMEs in the UK. Continue reading →

Today the Nesta Study ‘Understanding Alternative FinanceÂ – The UK Alternative Finance Industry Report‘ was released. The researchers Peter Baeck, Liam Collins and Bryan Zhang worked in four stages to compile this great report. One included questioning more than 15,000 users with the help of the platforms in distributing the surveys. Furthermore to gauge awareness of the general public for alternative finance 2,007 consumers and 506 SMEs were questioned.

The more than 90 page report documents and visualizes the fast ongoing growth of all alternative finance sectors in the UK and the positive reception by the users. I will conclude by citing some graphs from the study to induce everybody interested in p2p lending and alternative finance to read the full study.

Chart from study page 9