Wellesley stops offering longer-term P2P loans to investors

WELLESLEY has stopped offering longer-term peer-to-peer loans to its investors, Peer-to-Peer Finance News has learnt.

The lender, which declares itself “the first and only P2P platform to place our own funds into every loan we make,” now only offers a one-year loan with a 2.25 per cent annual interest rate and a two-year loan with a 2.35 per cent annual interest rate, both paid on maturity.

It had previously offered three, four and five-year P2P loans on its website.  

Under a section of its website advertising its 30-day product access policy, it still states that it will match investors’ funds to loans with terms of between one month and five years.

A company spokesperson said that longer-maturity loans had been removed “in the past couple of months” and that the terms of its loans “are quite flexible”, depending on “lenders’ capabilities”.

Wellesley is no longer a member of the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association, having resigned from the industry trade body in 2014. As such, it does not have to subscribe to the organisation’s rules on transparency and does not publish its full loan book like the eight P2PFA members do.  

The platform says it currently has 100 loans in its portfolio, totalling £228.1m.

Its default rate has been very low. It saw no loan losses until 2015, when they equated to 0.55 per cent of the loan book. This year, defaults equated to 0.83 per cent as of 31 September. However, this does not result in losses for the platform’s lenders due to Wellesley’s provision fund.

Have you invested in Wellesley? What do you think of their decision to remove longer-term loan offerings? Get in touch at info@peer.snobmonkey.com.