Pollen Street Capital’s Paul Noble steps down from Lending Works board

Pollen Street Capital (PSC) partner Paul Noble has stepped down from the board of Lending Works, now that the investment manager is no longer running the Pollen Street Secured Lending (PSSL) fund.

Noble has held a non-executive director role at the peer-to-peer consumer lending platform for the past two-and-a-half years, also serving as a member of the risk and audit committee.

At the start of this month, Waterfall replaced PSC as the manager of the PSSL investment trust, following a boardroom tussle over due diligence and transparency.

“Given the change in fund manager of the PSSL fund, Pollen Street no longer has an investor director on the Lending Works board, hence Paul stepping down,” said Nick Harding, chief executive of Lending Works.

Lending Works raised £2.8m of equity funding in 2018, led by private equity house Maven Capital Partners, with £800,000 of backing from Pollen Street Capital and NVM Private Equity.

The platform has gone through a number of changes this year, having frozen all new investments and lending since April due to pandemic pressures. It extended its “normalisation period” for another three months on 1 October.

In July, Lending Works announced the completion of its acquisition by alternative investment manager Intriva Capital.

Noble, who also serves as chief executive of green home improvement loans provider Allium Lending Group, has now joined digital bank Tandem as chief commercial officer after it acquired Allium in August.

Noble will work with the team to develop new products and services, including an initial offering of green mortgages and green savings accounts, whilst continuing to grow the green home lending portfolio that Tandem acquired from Allium.

He has previously held c-level roles at Lloyds TSB, Barclaycard, Barclays Bank and RBS.