Creating a virtuous circle of investors and borrowers in P2P
The Kuflink story continues to unfold, with the news that in the teeth of the worst that Covid-19 can throw at us, investors have continued to invest in our peer-to-peer lending platform and we are delighted to announce that investment levels are approaching £95m.
We have been a supporter of the intermediary channel since 2012 and launched our P2P proposition in 2016. It gives us a secure source of funding and means that we have a stable reserve which has powered our bridging and development finance offering to the UK’s brokers ever since.
In February, Kuflink had reached £75m of inward investment, when Covid-19 began to impact across the world. Encouragingly, although there were withdrawals by investors, the outflow was never significant and in the period since the end of the first lockdown, investment amounts have returned strongly, much of it from existing investors.
I am very proud of the fact that to date, Kuflink has paid back over £59m in capital to investors, not counting interest. In that time not one investor has lost money on any of the projects chosen by Kuflink into which investor funds were placed. This is a testament to our dedicated team, who assess the enquiries we receive that require funding and ensure that only the best propositions are introduced to our investors.
It is one of the reasons we are attracting more development finance deals. Developers and their agents who have used our platform before, understand our standards of scrutiny and the importance we place on the quality of the projects they are asking us to fund and appreciate our thorough but rapid response to their requests.
There might be bigger P2P platforms but Kuflink, with its more modest growth plans, has proved conclusively that it can produce decent returns for private investors with minimum risk because it successfully matches incoming investment with properly researched projects and deals.
From the number of returning investors, we know that our offering is popular and delivers.
Our strategy provides mortgage advisers with the kind of short term funding they want for their customers and has been consistently available throughout the pandemic. Advisers need to know they can rely on funding sources. In March, when the lockdown came into force, many bridging and development finance lenders pulled out, but we were able to continue offering the same service throughout.
For investors who, in part or whole, wanted to withdraw their money as the pandemic grew, our secondary market successfully placed over £1.9m with existing Kuflink investors. None of our withdrawing investors lost any money and many of them have returned to be active investors on our platform.
Kuflink continues to offer great value for investors in the returns that it has consistently returned and a wonderful resource to developers and those who require short term funding secured on property. A virtuous circle.