This ballooning in demand has been attributed largely to the platform’s decision to drop its minimum investment amount from £10k to £1k in December last year. LendInvest has reportedly enjoyed a 52% uptick in investor requests since having made that decision. It looks like LendInvest are managing to convert that uptick in investor requests into investments with January volume nudging just over £13.1m, LendInvest's biggest month since September last year. According to AltFi Data, this gives LendInvest a 15% share of the rapidly expanding UK peer to peer business lending market.
Having launched back in May 2013, LendInvest initially operated with a minimum investment amount of £50k. The amount was subsequently reduced to £10k, before having taken another dive to the current £1k level. This process is all part of an effort from the platform to make its returns more widely available to retail investors. That is not to say, of course, that the platform will be abandoning its interest in third party, institutional partnerships.
Christian Faes, Co-Founder and CEO of the platform, explained:
"We have made a huge investment in the development of our technology, and we now have a platform that has the foundations to scale significantly. We wanted to make sure that we could cope with the increased investor interest in LendInvest, and had the most robust system possible, before we opened up the platform to the everyday investor.
"The returns that LendInvest gives investors are of the best in the peer-to-peer market. These investor returns all come with the comfort that the loan is secured by first registered charge against UK property, and underwritten by an experienced lending team with a track record of over 6 years."
The question now is whether LendInvest is capable of churning out enough deals -to keep up with so significant a spike in investor demand.
