Crowdstacker plans foray into pensions

CROWDSTACKER is planning to launch a self-invested personal pension (SIPP) wrapper for its peer-to-peer loans this year.

Mark Bristow, co-founder of Crowdstacker, told Peer-to-Peer Finance News that the platform is in talks with a pension trustee about offering a low-cost product.

“P2P loans can be held within a SIPP structure but it can be hard to find a provider who will facilitate this in a cost effective way,” Bristow said.

“Often it can mean an investor needs to transfer their whole pension to a less well known provider and that can be expensive.”

Read more: Crowdstacker IFISA attracting £1m a month

Instead, he explained, Crowdstacker is looking to launch its own low-cost product that would let investors put their P2P loans in a SIPP wrapper that can then be held alongside other mainstream pensions.

“This helps overcome the issue of needing to transfer your whole pension to a less well-known provider just to invest in P2P.  Other solutions aren’t mainstream so this will allow investors to hold a P2P SIPP for loans on our platform while still keeping other pension products,” Bristow said.

He also suggested this could be a useful way to reach out to financial advisers who currently disregard the space.

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Crowdstacker was one of only 12 P2P platforms to receive full regulatory authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority and HMRC in April 2016, enabling it to offer the Innovative Finance ISA. Data released by Crowdstacker last October revealed that 90 per cent of its IFISA investors had not lent through the platform before, affirming predictions that the tax-free wrapper would open up P2P to a wider range of investors.

Read more: Innovative Finance ISAs: The game changer