P2P funsters ride Lowe wave

Ian Rogers
With a mostly thin track record and able leadership, the peer-to-peer and marketplace lending crowd are off for the run they deserve.

Yield hungry, often older, holders of cash will be prime targets, with the rates of returns in P2P besting bank dividends and whatever term deposit rates turn out to be.

Latrobe Financial is the original and one of the best.

Look at the list of investment opportunities at Marketlend, Leo Tyndall's outfit. The list is vast some days and a fair chunk of robo-funding is seeing a high percentage of applications settled.

Among a crazy wave of others in this sector is SocietyOne, the best known P2P lender in Australia. Only 322 investors? That's on the website.

"SocietyOne became Australia's first ever fintech marketplace lender to break A$600 million in lending," CEO Mark Jones wrote in a release for the Momentum Media's Fintech Business Awards on March 26.

At Marketlend, it's $76 million in loans funded by 706 active investors.

Looking for a 6 per cent return on cash? You can probably get that.

16 per cent, how about that? You can probably get that too.