Payday P2P lender Welendus receives full FCA approval

WELENDUS, the peer-to-peer payday lender, has received full authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA.)

The milestone comes a year after the company was formed.

The platform, which wants to shake-up the payday lending market by offering more reasonable interest rates than its competitors, launched a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs in January to raise £300,000, but closed that campaign two weeks ago and instead started a new one to raise £100,000.

Nadeem Siam, founder and chief executive of Welendus, said at the time that due to the regulatory process the firm had to close its first crowdfunding campaign early and aim for a lower target.

The lender ended up raising £117,580, which will go towards recruiting new staff, marketing, technology and initial funding for a guarantee account.

The company has been busy behind the scenes in the run up to regulatory approval and trademarked the terms ‘AutoMatch’ and ‘AutoDiversify’ in June for use on its platform.

AutoMatch will be used to describe the process of automatically deploying investors’ funds, while the AutoDiversify feature will be used to spread investors’ money across a variety of loans.

Siam said there has been initial interest from around 20 lenders and enough support to meet its four to five month lending targets.