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Lee Birkett is a man who knows an opportunity when it presents himself. He rode the rising wave of the mortgage market as Chief Executive of Prestbury Holdings and he sees a similar opportunity in the peer-to-peer lending space.
By operating in the level of the market just below Zopa and Ratesetter, Lee believes eMoneyUnion will give consumers access to credit and cut out extortionate APRs charged by payday lenders. Here he talks about his journey from credit broker, to CEO, to the bottom falling out of the mortgage market and why he believes the future of personal borrowing and lending is undergoing massive change.
rebuildingsociety.com helps people set up quickly and professionally in the peer-to-peer and crowdfunding markets by providing a version of our proven software, which successfully operates in the UK peer-to-business lending market.
Find out more about eMoneyUnion
Find out more about rebuiuldingsociety.com’s range of white-labelled solutions
Viv Parry, MD of Exquisite Handmade Cakes Ltd recently spoke at rebuildingsociety.com’s Crowdfunding Roadshow at The Carriageworks in Leeds.
Viv is visibly passionate about her business, so when she decided the business required a £50,000 cake-portioning machine to compete more effectively in the coffee shop industry, she wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer. She turned to rebuildingsociety.com, successfully engaged its audience of individual lenders and secured a loan to help the business grow.
As Viv explains, the experience has transformed her view of what is possible through peer-to-business lending, including employees supporting their business, and given her fresh belief in her own ability as a business owner.
Borrow for your business through rebuildingsociety.com
Dragons’ Den is harming British entrepreneurialism and encouraging rude and dismissive behaviour among investors, says a leading UK business owner.
breathHR CEO and co-founder Jonathan Richards, writing on the Real Business website, said the “testosterone-loaded” judging on the long running TV show had infiltrated into the real world.
“The result of this is that many entrepreneurs and business owners think that their only options of funding lies between a bank that they are convinced won’t lend and an angel that they are certain will rip them apart,” Richards writes.
Of course, alternative financing, like the online peer-to-business funding available on rebuildingsociety.com, offer borrowers the opportunity of appealing to a much wider range of investors.
But borrowers should expect tough questioning from lenders, especially when they are investing their own capital. Do you think this is reasonable?
If a borrower can answer queries succinctly and effectively, our experience shows investors are more likely to lend quickly and in bulk.
rebuildingsociety.com is celebrating a series of contract wins as sales of its white-labelled peer-to-peer lending solution continues to grow.
With orders placed from the UK, Europe, the United Arab Emirates and Canada, the software service arm of the organisation continues to grow, while the loan book on rebuildingsociety.com has recently passed £2m.
eMoneyUnion, which has just raised growth capital through Crowdcube
Since rebuildingsociety.com started providing customised versions of its software to clients in 2013, it has successfully launched eMoneyUnion and Be the Lender in the UK, with imminent launches for clients in global markets.
Jayne Reid, Partner Director at rebuildingsociety.com commented: “Crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending really are of our time and entrepreneurs across the world realise its potential to positively transform business and personal finance.
Bank lending activity continues to generate considerable debate, but a recent upturn in Mergers & Acquisitions activity in the UK offers a ray of hope for brokers who are hoping to see their clients take a more positive attitude to growing their business.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether banks are lending or not. The banks say they are, business owners generally say they are not. Who is right? Well, in some ways it doesn’t matter what the banks are doing.
The reality of the situation is that there are many other options available to businesses who want to raise finance today than there were a few years ago. Asset finance, invoice finance, short term lending, and crowdfunding on an equity and debt basis are all viable options.
The appetite to invest
Perhaps the key question from the perspective of a commercial finance broker is whether a client has the appetite to invest in building their business. Recent years have seen business owners adopt a more cautious approach to invest in growing their businesses, whether this would be funded from their built up reserves or from obtaining a loan or equity finance.
Business owners are putting their fund-raising plans on their personal credit cards for 2014, according to new research1 by fast-growing peer-to-peer (P2P) firm, rebuildingsociety.com.
rebuildingsociety.com’s research into personal credit card use by business owners was featured in The Times on Saturday 8th February. Read our full press release
Before Christmas, we launched a consultation for lenders on the possibility of a contingency fund. Following a good response from existing lenders, we’ve compiled the results and found that a contingency fund would be welcomed on the whole by newer lenders, but not so much by experienced lenders.
With that in mind, we’ve set about creating the framework for our fund, which would be a first in the peer-to-business lending market in the UK.
We intend to make it opt-in for existing lenders, so those that value our market-leading gross returns can continue to operate at that level and opt-out for new lenders, to give them an element of comfort as they lend.
(From realbusiness.co.uk 06/02/2014) It’s official: Crowdfunding creates jobs, builds businesses and, against the expectations of many, attracts new investment, says Barry James.
These are the clear trends that we’ve been observing and writing about these last 12 months and more.
New research surveying 87 companies who’d successfully Crowdfunded confirmed it is good for business, good for jobs and attracts further investment. While some, including notably at least one UK Crowdfunding platform (Seerdrs, who’ve made a feature of this), have said that Crowdfunded companies would struggle to attract investors because of the many small shareholdings the opposite turns out to be true with over 70% in discussions with follow-on investors including 28% who’ve closed an angel investor or venture capital deal.
Britain’s alternative finance industry continues to break new ground. The peer-to-peer lending sector more than doubled in size during 2013, new figures reveal, as the crowdfunding community stepped up its efforts to exploit the inability of the Britain’s banks to lend – and the lack of appetite among many customers to borrow from them.
In all, the UK’s peer-to-peer lending sector lent £843m last year, 121 per cent more than in 2013, according to data published this week by the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association – and the very fact the sector now has its own trade body tells its own story. More than 3,700 businesses borrowed money this way, while 70,000 consumers took loans. The supply side is equally buoyant, with 86,000 active lenders in the sector last year.Moreover, peer-to-peer finance represents just one part of the crowdfunding scene, with new models springing up all the time. An increasingly diverse sector hopes that official regulation, due to be implemented in April, will boost its appeal still further. Plans to offer tax breaks to investors in alternative finance, now being actively discussed by the Treasury, would be another shot in the arm.That will no doubt prompt further launches in a business where first-mover advantage hasn’t always guaranteed success.
For now, however, here’s 14 of the best British crowdfunding companies: (more…)