Author Archives: Martin Baker

Crowdfunding And AltFi Seek Road To Local Success

Today we offer more reaction to the newly published academic report Financial innovation today: Towards economic resilience. The report concerns alternative finance, including crowdfunding, community shares and peer-to-peer lending, and is authored by Mark Davis and Tim Braunholtz-Speight from the Bauman Institute in Leeds. One of the appealing aspects of the report is the authors’ […]

Crowdfunding Offers Democratisation Of Finance

Today we continue with a further report on the newly published academic report Financial innovation today: Towards economic resilience. The report concerns alternative finance, including crowdfunding, community shares and peer-to-peer lending, and is authored by Mark Davis and Tim Braunholtz-Speight from the Bauman Institute in Leeds. One of the issues examined is the “democratisation” of […]

Crowdfunding: Decentralisation, Democratisation And Rapid Growth

A new report on alternative finance, including crowdfunding, community shares and peer-to-peer lending is attracting widespread interest in the media and elsewhere. Financial innovation today: Towards economic resilience is authored by Mark Davis and Tim Braunholtz-Speight from the Bauman Institute in Leeds. It examines a number of issues around what is termed the decentralisation of […]

Tech UK Ponders AltFi And SME Funding’s Fate

Tech UK reports the outcome of a seminar on alternative funding sources for small and medium-sized businesses, post-Brexit. Regular readers will be aware that this is a topic close to our hearts here at Money&Co. “With negotiations underway to extricate the UK from the European Union, techUK’s Financial Services & Payments Programme convened to explore what Brexit […]

Will P2P Lenders Take Risk On Their Own Books?

Today FT Alphaville looks at P2P accounting and an evolving business model in our sector. We offer an excerpt and our own commentary below (and encourage readers to subscribe to FT’s journalism offering). “One of the key features of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is an absence of centralised balance sheet risk. “In the traditional, boring model […]

Whisper It Gently: The Crowdfunding Word Is Spreading

Frustration is a word heard all too frequently in the process of financing small businesses. Survey after survey demonstrates that small businesses are frustrated by slow-moving traditional lenders. And alternative finance providers and facilitators, such as Money&Co., are upset by our seeming inability to get the message across that there is an alternative. However, we […]

Crowdfunding Regulation: For Once, We’re Not Better Together…

Our friends at Crowdfundinsider showcase an opinion piece on regulation by Italian lawyer, Alessandro Perro. The focus is on regulation. Mr Perro points out:   “The European internal market exploded: more than E5.4 billion was collected through alternative finance in 2015, according to a University of Cambridge report, with about E7  billion forecasted by the end of […]

Keeping The Crowd In Crowdfunding: New Data, Old Problem

Recent research throws new light on an old debate. What’t future of the crowd – the individual lender or equity investor – in crowdfunding? The new research comes via Consultancy.uk: “Alternative finance market for SMEs and personal loans, through marketplace lenders, has in the space of just five years, grown from almost nothing to £2.7 billion,” […]