Today we bring you a snapshot of the volatile alternative-finance lending sector. Our friends at AltFi run a piece on its recently published market report. One of the outcomes seems to be that Europe is catching up and will soon overtake the UK market: European originations among peer-to-peer and marketplace lending platforms soared by 80 per cent […]
Today, we bring news of a very strong statement of intent from a new North American player looking to invest in the UK Fintech sector. The timing is bold: many players have been struggling; the early form of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is disappearing in favour of niche lending to businesses with asset-backing pretty much a […]
Change is the one constant of the stories surrounding Covid-19 and its effect on our markets – small and medium-sized companies, and FinTech players in the alternative-finance sector. More on the problems of bounce-back loans soon. Meanwhile, our friends at P2P Finance News P2P Finance News report research on the new thinking the crisis has […]
Some major financial institutions (Coutts Bank, for example) have indicated they will not apply negative interest rates, should the Bank of England go that way, to deposit accounts. Others are not so clear What would the fallout be – especially for the alternative finance sector and its players? The Fintech Times looks at the potential […]
Today we bring news of a merger on the euity side of the crowdfunding fence – and add a report offering a cautionary note regarding equity fund raises generally. The UK’s biggest equity crowdfunding raise platforms, Crowdcube and Seedrs, have agreed on terms to merge. AltFi reports: The two firms, who say £2bn has been raised across their […]
The investment maxim is to buy at the sound of the cannon, and sell when the violins at the post-battle ball begin to play. It’ difficult to think of a noisier cannon sound than the all-pervasive pandemic, the likelihood of a brutally hard Brexit, and a nasty winter. So let’s see the news of technology […]
Mainstream finance’s enthusiasm for the direct-lending sub-sector of alternative finance has understandably abated after some poor investment experiences. AltFi reports the latest on a long-running saga involving an investment trust that’s been seeking a stable way forward for some time: Pollen Street Secured Lending (PSSL) has appointed Waterfall Asset Management to be its delegated portfolio manager, […]
There’s an old political adage about never wasting a good crisis. The UK government’s prompt, if unfocused, action to shore up SMEs with Bounce-Back Loans has proved to be an opportunity for the unscrupulous (who’ve been making the most of the Covid-19 crisis in a nasty way). Our friends at City A.M. report comment to […]
Regular readers will be aware that we monitor the progress – or otherwise – of major players in our own direct-lending sub-sector of FinTech. We offer the following extended excerpt of a news report from our friends at AltFi without further comment. Samir Desai, CEO and founder of listed lender Funding Circle, has purchased over 163,000 shares in the […]
Mainstream investors are of course paying more and more attention to FinTech opportunities. As part of the continuing theme we offer an extract from entirely uncontroversial opinion piece in AltFi that cites classics, such as “exit routes” as being desirable. Home truths… Research from Innovate Finance shows that investment in UK fintech dropped by 39% in the […]