Funding Circle hits €100m lending milestone in Germany

FUNDING Circle has hit the €100m (£88.2m) loans milestone in Germany just two years after launch in the country.

The business lending platform says 3,000 investors have backed 1,100 German businesses and created more than 2,000 jobs since 2015.

The platform entered the European market following its acquisition of German platform Zencap in 2015. It now has operations in the UK, US, Germany and the Netherlands.

Earlier this month it said it had passed £3bn of lending in the UK and $5bn globally across all its platforms.

In a recent interview with Peer2Peer Finance News, co-founder and chief executive Samir Desai said that the company wants to get to £100bn a year of new lending, which would create three million new jobs a year.

He also said that Funding Circle is eyeing further international expansion.

“We’re in four markets [UK, Germany, the US and the Netherlands] and we’d like to enter more,” Desai said.

“Everyone else has taken the approach of doing lots of different products in one market; we do the same product but in lots of different countries.

“Ours is a better model because you get huge synergies on the investor side – if they trust you in one market, they are willing to invest in others.”