MarketInvoice’s losses doubled in 2016

MARKETINVOICE saw its losses double during 2016, as the peer-to-peer invoice finance platform continues to use funds to scale up.

Its latest accounts on Companies House for 2016 showed a loss before taxation of £6m, increasing from £3.1m in 2015.

This is despite turnover increasing from £4.1m to £4.4m and an increasing number of invoices getting funded, at £442m, compared with £328m a year before.

Staff costs also increased from £3.9m to 5.7m, with £4.9m spent on salaries.

The highest paid director received £124,000, the same as last year.

Many P2P lenders are unprofitable as they are investing in growing the business.

For example, Funding Circle’s UK business only became cashflow positive in the fourth quarter of 2016.

“If you believe genuinely you can get to a level of scale where you’re originating $100bn (£81.3bn) a year, as we do, you should be investing a lot in the future – putting in place the controls, the infrastructure and the technology that will allow you to do that,” chief executive and co-founder Samir Desai told Peer2Peer Finance News last November.

And Zopa was profitable in the fourth quarter of last year for the first time since 2012, following “significant investment” in technology and infrastructure.

MarketInvoice has been bolstering its sales team to meet its ambition of lending £2bn this year and has expanded its product range with MarketInvoice Pro.

More recently, the platform, co-founded by Anil Stocker (pictured), has reported record inflows, with £161.9m of invoices funded in the second quarter of 2017, a 57.2 per cent year-on-year increase.

It has also secured agreements with German private bank Varengold and Portugal’s Banco BNI Europa,to provide funding to UK SMEs via its platform.