Crowdstacker IFISA attracting average of £7,000 from investors
CROWDSTACKER investors are putting more than £7,000 into their Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) on average, the platform has revealed.
Karteek Patel, chief executive of Crowdstacker, said the firm was still receiving around £1m a month in total through its tax-free wrapper.
The platform, which was one of the first to launch an IFISA last April, has also commissioned its own research asking investors across the country how they would use tax-efficient vehicles. One per cent of respondents said they would be interested in investing in an IFISA.
Patel says that based on the 52.1 million adults in the UK, if one per cent opened an IFISA and all invested the same average of around £7,000, that could mean £3.5bn flowing into the P2P sector across all platforms.
The research also asked what investors want from their IFISA, with 17 per cent seeking fixed income, 18 per cent wanting to know where their money is invested and 24 per cent seeking tax efficiency.
“What the data clearly demonstrates is that a large proportion of investors want more control and transparency over where their money is going, a fixed income, and tax efficiency,” Patel told Peer-to-Peer Finance News.
“Unfortunately many continue to invest in products which don’t offer all of this, possibly because they are only aware of the highest profile products. As a result, many investors are missing out and not getting exactly what they want.
“More and more providers are introducing their IFISA offering which is good to see, and we hope that awareness for the product will in turn grow.”
Read more: The IFISAs ready for this tax year
The amount invested in the Crowdstacker IFISA is just above the average subscription of £6,338 across cash and stocks and shares ISAs in the 2015-16 tax year.
In total, £80bn was invested in ISAs in the previous tax year across 12.7m accounts, HMRC figures show.
This was made up of £58.7bn in cash ISAs and £21.4bn in stocks and shares ISAs.
Read more: Abundance offers 2 per cent sweetener to IFISA investors
