Lending Works to raise five-year lender rate to 5.5pc
LENDING Works is hiking its five-year lender rate to a 13-month high of 5.5 per cent on Monday, due to rapid growth in origination volumes.
Its current five-year rate is 5.2 per cent.
The peer-to-peer consumer lender said that it expects to issue over £5m in loans this month for the first time ever, thanks to its improved software and new partnerships.
“For the past 24 months, we have focused intensively on two things: making our software better so customers are more likely to use Lending Works, and integrating with more partners through which customers can access our platform,” said the firm in a blog post on its website late on Wednesday. “As a result, we are approving vastly greater volumes of loans for creditworthy customers each day.”
With a number of new partnerships set to launch in the coming months, Lending Works said it expects that figure to double to £10m per month by mid-2018.
Lending Works announced a partnership with money management app Revolut in March, which the firms said would provide consumers with instant credit at half the cost of UK banks.
The platform, which was the first Peer-to-Peer Finance Association member to launch its Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) back in February, said that investors’ money would be matched in just a few days, given the current shorter lending queue.
Lending Works also said on Thursday that “the challenge of balancing the supply of lender capital with demand for loans from borrowers is an ongoing one.”
This is certainly true for the firm, which had to close its IFISA to new investors just 24 hours after launch due to “unbelievable demand” that led to an influx of funds that could not quickly be matched. It re-opened the IFISA a week later after increasing loan origination volumes.