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Funding Circle has been in business since 2010 and is a lending marketplace that enables investors to lend money directly to small and medium-sized businesses.
The typical RoI can be up to 8% which is better than some Hedge Funds. The way they process defaults is a lot better than some banks. When a lender defaults, Funding Circle will reduce the payments allowing the business to recover. Often the company is able to return most of the money lent.
Funding Circle was founded in 2010 by Samir Desai, James Meekings and Andrew Mullinger and was the first business to allow peer-to-peer lending for businesses in Britain and now operates in the Germany, US, UK and the Netherlands.
Funding Circle has enabled over £5 billion in loans to small businesses as at June 2018. Funding Circle is brilliant for investors looking for a better return than many banks could give them, but also a bit higher than ZOPA's 4% ~ 5.5% returns.
Like ZOPA, the Funding Circle platform has gone through many changes. Initially you were presented with different markets based on risk and could select businesses on credit ratings, knowing that if you went too high you would lose takers and if you went too low you would get little return on investment, you also had to deal with defaults. A few years ago this was replace with a "black box" type of system where you put money in at one end and a bit more money comes out of the other end.