Marketplace lender Funding Circle reportedly lent out more just a little over £95 million for the month of October and broke the UK’s monthly origination volume record.
AltFi revealed that according to its data, Funding Circle has officially lent more than £1.6 billion for over 23,700 loans. A total of 1,187 new loans were issued by the lender last month, ranging between £5,000 and £572,000. James Meekings, co-founder and UK managing director of Funding Circle, shared with the media outlet that in the past six years he and his team have noticed a strong demand from small businesses during the final quarter of the year.
Funding Circle’s record-breaking milestone comes just one day after the lender announced it was making changes to its interest rates. The lender stated that it regularly reviews the rates and takes into account various factors, which includes macroeconomics trends:
“At Funding Circle, our aim is for investors to be able to earn attractive returns that reflect the level of risk involved when lending to businesses. As part of this commitment, we regularly review our rates, taking a number of factors into account including macroeconomic trends, expected bad debt rates and wider competition in the market. Over the last six years you have helped over 17,000 small businesses access finance. This has provided us with more credit performance data, allowing us to make even more accurate pricing decisions. Following our recent review, we wanted to let you know about some upcoming changes to the fixed interest rates on the Funding Circle marketplace.”
The platform also explained that the new rates will go into effect on November 7th, but will not affect any loan parts users currently hold and will also not apply to property loans:
“Taking into account the rate changes across all risk bands, and the proportion of loans we expect to list in each risk band, we expect the estimated return for investors with a diversified portfolio, after fees and bad debt, to be approximately 7.0%.”