We were delighted that our flexible Innovative Finance ISA was rated among ‘six of the best’ IFISAs last week. In an article in P2P Finance News, peer to peer lending specialists 4thWay also named our IFISA as one of the top two manual loan selection products available.
Manual loan selection still has a place in P2P Lending and Innovative ISA and many of our existing Lenders feed back to us that maintaining this traditional, more controlled investment option is one of the reasons they continue to invest via our platform. Just like the choice of three LTV-based investment tranches we offer, a choice of which loans to invest in enables Lenders to feel comfortable and actively involved in their investment process.
But things change and we adapt with the times. We probably wouldn’t have believed when we started up that a little over four years later we would be approaching our second tax year as an ISA Manager. But it’s certainly a great outcome for our registered Lenders – the availability of tax-free returns on the same commercial property-secured loans, just through investing via an ISA.
They can even use old ISA ‘pots’ (many earning less than inflation) to fund loan investments, so they don’t have to wait to invest if they’ve ‘maxed out’ their annual subscription allowance for 2017-18, or just don’t have disposable funds. You’ve worked hard to save to your ISAs in the past – Don’t Lose Interest Now.
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The flexibility of our ISA can really come in handy for ISA investors – your funds need no longer be locked in as with traditional ISAs. Funds within flexible ISAs like ours’ can be withdrawn and still maintain their ISA status if returned by the end of the same tax year. When you consider the number of years people have been saving to ISAs, transferring to a flexible ISA (or ISAs) can provide access to some significant sums of money.
ISAs are changing and we’re evolving with the industry – albeit mindful not to stray from our core principles – Security, Transparency and Choice. We won’t relax our underwriting standards just to get more loans on the platform, we’re reluctant to follow the crowd and make our fees less transparent AND we think it’s important to keep offering manual selection for those who prefer to be more discerning with their investments.
The exposure of P2P lending to a wider audience with the launch of IFISA almost two years ago, coupled with persistently low cash interest rates has meant we’re encountering prospective Lenders with a wider variety of attitudes to risk and return expectations. We’re also finding that many of them, particularly those who are new to peer to peer, prefer lower-involvement investing.
So, whilst we are well placed with our loan tranches and reputation as one of the safest P2P lending platforms around (with no investor losses to date), we wanted to be more accommodating to investors who’d like an alternative to manual selection. We’ll therefore soon be launching our ‘Auto-Lend’ facility.
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Initially Proplend Auto-Lend will only apply to our safest Tranche A investments (0-50% LTV) and only to In Funding loans, albeit we expect to open it up to Proplend Loan Exchange (secondary market) loans in due course. This new, relatively passive ‘Auto-Lend’ option, offers automatic investment and automatic diversification, and is available for our Classic accounts, (SSAS and SIPP) pension accounts and ISA.
We hope and expect our Lenders will see this as a welcomed ADDITIONAL OPTION to our platform, hot on the heals of our recent Proplend.com and account dashboard enhancements last month. And we wish all our new and existing platform participants a happy new ISA year and many happy (tax-free) returns.
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Want to find out more about P2P Lending and the Innovative Finance ISA?
We have a raft of information available about peer to peer investing in our Investor Help Centre. Alternatively, browse our comprehensive IFISA guide to find out more about tax-free investing through a flexible ISA.
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