Funding Circle celebrates record-breaking week

FUNDING Circle broke its own lending record last week, with £32m allocated to more than 460 businesses between the 14th and 18th of November.

By the end of the week, the platform also listed a record number of loans on its marketplace, and the total value of new loans listed was at an all-time high. The new loans had a total value of more than £29m, averaging £69,887 per loan. The largest loan value was £537,780 and the smallest loan value was £5,000.

The platform had its last record-beating week at the end of September (26-30) when it funded £25m in loans. September proved to be a record-breaking month for all of the ‘big three’ P2P platforms. Zopa funded £67.8m in loans throughout the month, breaking its own previous record by more than £10m, and RateSetter revealed that it had doubled its new investor accounts since the base rate cut in August. In the same month, Funding Circle also confirmed that it had surpassed the £1.5bn milestone in lending since inception.

Rising inflation, the weak pound and low interest rates have seen many savers turn to the alternative finance market in an effort to find better returns, while the same economic factors have resulted in a dearth of SME funding on the high street. This has led more and more businesses turn to peer-to-peer lending as a way of growing their business.