There’s a new peer-to-peer ISA on the market. Asset-backed lending platform Ablrate has just launched its own take on the Innovative Finance ISA, after receiving full authorisation from the FCA in April.
Ablrate offers a self-select marketplace, meaning investors must hand-pick the loans they wish to invest in, rather than investing across the marketplace, or segments of it, more broadly. However the platform says that it is looking at introducing various products that will offer diversification across a number of loans.
Ablrate facilitates asset-backed transactions in aircraft, capital equipment and other secured, income generating loans. The firm claims that its loans deliver interest rates of between 10 and 14 per cent per annum.
In this first week of launching its new tax-efficient product, Ablrate will allow investors to set up an IFISA and for cash deposits to be made, but it will not allow transfers in. “We want to be able to get everyone going with their IFISA first and then allow transfers in from other providers after the first week of our launch,” explained David Bradley-Ward, CEO of Ablrate.
Bradley-Ward went on to explain that the new IFISA offering will be flexible, meaning investors can withdraw funds and deposit them again within the same tax year, without affecting their allowance.
“The flexibility of choice is a cornerstone of our platform i.e lenders choose what to invest in, at what level and decide when and if to sell on the secondary market,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that our IFISA product gave the same flexibility to our lenders.”
Ablrate has facilitated £24m of loans to date, with £7.2m traded on its secondary market. The platform launched in beta in 2014.
