MoneyThing readies for IFISA launch in current tax year
MONEYTHING has begun accepting pre-registrations for its Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) ahead of a soft launch in early March.
The peer-to-peer business lender said it will be accepting pre-registrations for the tax wrapper from existing lenders only at first.
There will be a soft launch of the IFISA in early March 2018 followed by a phased roll-out from the start of the new financial year in April 2018.
Pre-registered lenders will be invited to complete an IFISA application from March, but the platform said that, subject to demand, it may not be possible to complete all applications in this tax year.
MoneyThing gained Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) approval in March 2017 and ISA manager status from HMRC the following July, but has been working on the product ever since.
“In response to lender demand, we’ve been working hard to get the IFISA launched in this financial year,” Ed Pearce, managing director at MoneyThing, said.
“Time is tight, but we’ll do our best to sign up as many customers as we can during the soft-launch phase.
“We see the IFISA as a crucial part of lender services so we took the decision to operate our own IFISA instead of using a third party provider. That meant more development, but longer term, gives is more flexibility over the services we offer.”
MoneyThing said last year that it was in no rush to launch an IFISA as it needed to work on matching healthy investor inflows with good quality loan deals.