After forming the partnership in October last year, Scottish Enterprise’s injection of £2.7m to LendingCrowd’s Scottish SME lending effort has now helped complete deals to the tune of £3m across the platform.
CEO of LendingCrowd,Stuart Lunn, has said that the platform expects to have done £18m of deals by the end of 2017, compared with its previous achievement of £4.5m in 2016.
In 2018, the peer-to-peer lender will target a total of £15m of loans directly to Scottish SMEs, coming in at more than a third of the total £40m forecast across the UK.
LendingCrowd’s ISA, which launched in February earlier this year, has also contributed to the success, with Lunn attributing it as responsible for much of the growth in investor funds on the platform.
To help drive growth and scale the business, former RBS and Clydesdale Bank director Adrian Innes joined LendingCrowd as Head of Origination in September.
The initial investment from SE was supported by Scottish Investment Bank (SIB), and marked its first foray into the alternative lending market. Reported at the time as “one of the first initiatives of its kind in Europe”, it is hoped that these latest results will encourage further funding into the space.
