Tag: crowdlending

BUSINESS AS USUAL AT ARCHOVER

Author
Alex Taylor
Date
It took less than two hours yesterday (June 27) for lenders to snap up a £150,000 business loan on ArchOver’s ‘Secured and Insured’ crowdlending platform. The 12 month facility, offered on behalf of rapidly-expanding accountancy firm Spain Brothers, was the first new transaction to appear on the platform since the EU Referendum result was announced last Friday. Lenders will receive a return of 8% per annum.
Commenting on the loan, ArchOver CEO Angus Dent said: “We don’t yet know exactly what the future holds, but, far from retreating, we see this as a period of opportunity. We can demonstrate that the ArchOver platform remains in good working order for the benefit of ambitious SMEs and discerning lenders. Successful companies have clearly not lost the confidence to raise the finance they need to develop and grow their businesses, while lenders have equally not lost their appetite for keeping their investment returns as high as possible in this uncertain world.”
“It speaks volumes for the loyalty of our lenders who clearly appreciate our easy-to-access systems and trust our ‘Secured and Insured’ model to safeguard their interests as well as deliver attractive returns.”

The Sharing Economy – Driven by Peer Review and Trust

Author
Angus Dent
Date

A couple of weeks ago, while most of us were distracted, PWC posted ‘The Sharing Economy’ report. The main point taken from the sharing economy piece would be ‘never settle for stable’. The sharing economy explains that businesses cannot be taken for granted in a fast-changing world, todays changes can be changed again by tomorrow and so businesses cannot stand still. To maximise, companies must embrace change and continuously develop in order to maximise consumer benefit and competitive advantage.

The key points I’d take from the Sharing Economy piece:

–          Peer review is far and away the main driver of trust, 92% said they valued peer review above all other forms of marketing and advertising.

–          Without trust services aren’t used much, 89% said that ‘trust’ was a major factor.

–          A mind shift has begun in business from offering a product, an item, and hoping it will sell to building relationships and providing service and thereby creating a greater perceived value.

–          Embrace change/disruption in industry. We should always be looking for new ways, never standing still. Always be thinking about your competitors and how they may be changing.

sharing economy

The suggestion of the report is that only companies willing to rise to the challenges and expand are ‘poised to survive – and the potential ahead will be constrained only by the imagination of decision makers’. As companies utilise the sharing economy and create partnerships and collaboration they will find more ways to profit and aid their businesses – while helping the community and its industry sector to grow and sustain success.

Of course there’s nothing new in suggesting that only those who adapt will survive, Charles Darwin being the master of this theory – “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”

The crowdlending sector was born from an inability of the banks (and other providers of finance, banks becoming the collective noun for a failing sector) to adapt to changed circumstances, their failure was dramatic, public and adversely affected all of us. The lesson is clear we must keep adapting not to go the way of the banks that may yet follow the dodo.

Media and finance industry need to work together to show that P2P comes in more than one flavour

Author
Angus Dent
Date

Once again, we find mainstream media treating the diverse alternative finance sector as one homogenous group and misleading or alarming investors in the process.

This time, we have Ruth Lythe of the Daily Mail launching with a headline on 7 June, “MPs attack risky online firms offering 7% returns from lending savers’ cash to strangers to buy cars and even phones”.

The article refers to Zopa’s recent announcement of its point-of-sale partnership with Unshackled.com.

In essence, the article can be summarised in one of the lines within it: ‘P2P loans are risky’.  This is written without providing any context for the reader, which is both naïve and does a great disservice to existing and potential investors.

  • A comment on the losses experienced to date by peer-to-peer investors would have been good (they are below what the banks accept as ‘normal’ and are published by the largest platforms in the smallest detail for all to see, which is something the banks never do).
  • A comment on the variety of models available in P2P would have been helpful too, rather than bracket everything under one, doom-laden label.

Of course a judgement has to be made when investing in peer-to-peer. Judgement is required in most forms of investment, but what really matters and needs explaining when making sweeping assessments of this nature is how the likelihood of loss is mitigated and managed, which differs from platform to platform.

In the case of Archover, all business loans have to pass the scrutiny of not only our own lending specialists, but also those of leading credit insurers, who provide cover on the underlying asset that we use as security. If we were even tempted to lower our standards we would not be allowed to do so. I know of no bank that can provide that same level of comfort.

Daily Mail Old

In other parts of the market, RateSetter and others have provision funds which cover all losses. This means that, to date, nobody has ever lost money lending over their platforms. The banks rely on the good old UK tax payer for such a guarantee.

I think I speak for the entire industry here when I say the FCA is doing an excellent job in making sure investors are as informed as possible about the nature of their investments.

Andrew Tyrie’s letter to the FCA on behalf of the Treasury Select Committee is perfectly reasonable and I have no doubt the Regulator will provide a full and well considered response in good time. This will no doubt include some of the facts, such as net returns for investors after default being in the range of 5%-7% since the inception of the industry, the never before seen level of transparency in financial services and the resilience of the sector to economic shocks – even against the most stringent scenario laid out by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA).

The Regulator will certainly have our full backing if even more improvements can be made to help investors.

As an industry, we do not criticise the Daily Mail or the media at large for advising caution, but we do implore it to examine the facts and make a more rounded assessment on behalf of its readers.

Are the big institutions embracing the wisdom of Crowdlending?

Author
Angus Dent
Date

The fallout of the stress tests has generally been good news for the Banks. As I discussed in my earlier post, Standard Chartered and Royal Bank of Scotland, however, struggled and only got over the line by promising to keep back more capital. RBS announced that they had shed some of their riskier assets, including Irish property loans to the tune of £1.62 billion that seemingly had the potential to bring rich reward; the spectre of the burst of the Irish property bubble clearly enough to put the bank off. Therefore, it isn’t exactly a surprise that RBS recently announced plans to lend money to mid-sized businesses in conjunction with three global asset managers, namely AIG, M&G and Hermes Investment Management. The partnership will aim to provide finance to between 75 and 80 mid-sized businesses with loans ranging from £25 million to £100 million.

The partnership will allow RBS to benefit from extra due diligence carried out by the asset managers, as well as allowing the bank to further diversify risk. The funds benefit from exposure to an established market that was previously restricted to traditional finance providers. However, the link comes as a result of asset managers increasingly acting as “shadow” banks with companies approaching them for finance. The new partnership will see RBS continue to carry out the brunt of client negotiation directly with the borrower, whilst the asset managers carry out their own due diligence and credit analysis.

The primary (only) benefit to the borrower would be the consolidation of parties to negotiate with; however I would reason that dealing with scrupulous, profit driven asset managers alongside the sluggish, outdated bureaucracy of the banks will hardly speed the process up for borrowers. The relationship is aimed at a niche group of businesses that are already backed by private equity companies, so the move to “Crowdlending” is certainly a tentative, experimental one. It does nothing to combat the issue that the banks aren’t lending to SMEs, the lifeblood of the British economy. But it does show that the banks are willing to share their clients with other finance providers to ensure that a solution is available.

This is all very good news for Peer to Peer Crowdlenders who aim to fill the SME finance gap: expect to see more partnerships with banks emerge that allow banks to continue to lend to small businesses to the extent that their capital resources allow, with specialist crowdlending platforms plugging the gap. Indeed, only yesterday, AltFi reported the news that ThinCats had sold a 73.4% stake in the company to ESF Capital, a European specialist investment firm, in the process appointing ESF Capital CEO John Mould as ThinCats CEO. The view here is that the linking with an investment firm will bring significant new money to lend SMEs, and Mould’s appointment will certainly facilitate that. After all, Mould is the former COO and CFO of the aforementioned Hermes Investment Management- RBS could be the first of the “Big Four” banks to start lending across a Crowdlending platform to UK SMEs; and in all likelihood it will be followed by the others.