LendInvest Tops £100m Mark – Merges Lending Data with Montello

LendInvest has cemented its position as the 4th largest UK peer-to-peer platform after a massive spike in lending volume.

The Buy-to-Let bridging loans provider has rocketed up the leaderboards since launching in May of last year. LendInvest was sitting at £76 million in cumulative lending last Friday. The platform now appears to have originated £106,414,924 since inception. LendInvest issued a statement suggesting that it is now seeing up to £2 million of new money added to the platform each week. The average duration of loans listed on the platform is 6 months, so that £2m a week is presumably funding deals alongside a large amount of capital that is being continuously re-invested.

Christian Faes, Co-Founder of LendInvest, commented:

"The 'Big 3' of the UK peer-to-peer lending market, is clearly now the 'Big 4', which must firmly include LendInvest. We are one of the fastest growing peer-to-peer platforms in the world, leveraging off a 6 year track record of actively lending in the short-term Buy-To-Let mortgage market in the UK.

We are in a unique position with our funds management business, Montello. This provides us with strong institutional investor relationships, and a relatively substantial balance sheet from those funds, that can be deployed on the LendInvest platform.”

We are definitely exploiting this advantage as we move to the top of the marketplace lending league tables."

So how do we explain this sudden rise in lending figures? It all boils down to the recently announced decision of Montello Funds Management to invest in a large portion of the loans originated by LendInvest. This development was announced back in early July. Montello is a traditional bridging loans provider and is also the company that originally “incubated” the LendInvest platform.

LendInvest indicated that the near £30 million that was added to the platform’s counter last Friday is in fact the product of a change in methodology, as opposed to an unprecedented flurry of lending activity. The LendInvest cumulative volume figure now factors in all loans funded (both by retail investors and via the Montello Fund) since the platform was established in May 2013.

In pursuit of providing a greater level of transparency into the merging of LendInvest and Montello, the platform has now appointed a data scientist who will be working towards making detailed track-record data publicly available over the next few months. AltFi will await the update with keen interest.