Funding Circle has crossed the half a billion pound mark in cumulative lending.

The original peer-to-business lending platform crossed the milestone today, after having lent £23,716,120 in January so far. Funding Circle covers just over a 5^th of the UK alternative finance space in terms of market share over the last 3 months. The £500m figure does not include the platform’s lending to US businesses, where transactional flows are also progressing at a rapid pace.

To put this growth into some context, it was as recently as June 2014 that Funding Circle hit £300m in cumulative lending. AltFi Data has made a rough estimate of where the platform’s cumulative total might be by the end of 2015:

This news comes less than a week after a referral arrangement between the platform and RBS was announced. Coupling the potential impact of that deal with various government initiatives like the P2P ISA and the mandatory referrals scheme, not to mention the mounting tide of institutional capital flows into the space and Funding Circle's burgeoning network of local louncil partnerships, and even the £1.15bn prediction above might appear a little conservative.