P2P lending sector goes on hiring spree
Peer-to-peer lending platforms have been on a recruitment drive over the past year, ramping up hiring plans as they expand their teams in anticipation of new business.
Property lender Invest & Fund has increased its head count by a third in recent months, hiring two new business development managers, a new finance director and head of compliance.
Meanwhile, CrowdProperty entered the March 2020 lockdown with 28 employees, but now has 42 members of staff on its payroll.
Business lender Rebuildingsociety has recently made some new appointments to its board, while also announcing a new Kickstarter scheme to hire 10 young people over the summer to “help the business pursue a strategy of growth”.
The largest P2P firms – Funding Circle, Assetz Capital and Zopa – have also been building up their workforce in recent months.
Funding Circle has been actively seeking to expand its engineering team, as well as hiring in newly-created roles such as ‘head of new products covering small- and medium-sized enterprise lending’.
Assetz Capital recently launched a new bridging product and has been hiring bridging specialists to fill these positions, while Zopa has been refocusing its customer acquisition strategy by creating new roles in its partnerships division, to “convince potential partner brands of the value of embedding Zopa’s lending products within their customer experiences”.
The hiring spree reflects a busy time for the alternative lending sector. The economic downturn has created a need for non-bank lending services. The wind-down of the government’s lending schemes is also expected to create new opportunities for business lenders and property lenders across the UK, while consumer lending has also been on the rise.