JustUs sister company to launch simplified IFISA

JustUs sister compa­ny Moneybrain is set to launch a simplified Inno­vative Finance ISA (IFSA), in response to the City regulator’s proposals in its call for input on consumer investments.

In its call for input, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) proposed that investment products should be simplified, while higher-risk products should be labelled with traffic-light colour coding, in an effort to better communicate risk.

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Lee Birkett, founder of peer-to-peer lending platform JustUs and personal finance app Moneybrain, said JustUs already has traffic light colour coded products of red, amber and green to represent low, medium and high risk.

In response to the FCA’s proposals, Moneybrain will launch a simplified IFISA later this month.

Birkett said it will be an auto-invest IFISA, availa­ble on the Moneybrain app only, providing returns of three per cent per annum by investing across a port­folio of JustUs loans.

He said this will oper­ate in a simple two-click process, once investors pass the appropriateness test, which Moneybrain is working to streamline to make simpler.

This contrasts to JustUs’ other IFISAs which have about 20 different risk op­tions of loans that investors can select.

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Birkett said that all of JustUs’ products are cur­rently on the Moneybrain app as well, but he will review whether to remove the other JustUs IFISAs from the app when launch­ing the simplified one.

“It’s just a simple, easy way to get exposure to great asset-backed P2P loan units,” Birkett said.

“We already have the traffic light colour coding for our products and pro­posed it to the FCA a few years ago.

“And some people want it even simpler. A simplified IFISA is something people want, it’s making investing easier, not more difficult, people just want to click on the app to invest.

“Our objective is to provide access to liquidity, so people have access to funds at a click of a button, something only a handful of P2P operators have been doing including JustUs.”

Read more: What’s next for the IFISA?