Peer-to-Peer Business Lending: Where Did the Platforms Go?

Between 2020 and 2022, the UK’s peer-to-peer business lending market lost most of its biggest names. Funding Circle closed its retail investor platform in March 2022, and Assetz Capital followed in December of the same year. Zopa had already turned itself into a bank, and RateSetter’s loan book had gone to Metro Bank the year before that. When the P2P Finance Association (the sector’s own trade body) wound itself up, it read like a full stop.

That is the story most coverage still tells, and as far as it goes, it is accurate. What it misses is what happened afterwards. The market did not empty out; it changed shape. A smaller and much more fragmented set of regulated platforms is still lending to UK businesses, and the great majority of them now want land or property as security. That is a harder thing to summarise than a collapse, which is probably why so few people have bothered.

The practical consequence is that searching for a P2P business loan today is confusing rather than simply fruitless. Old names still surface. Funding Circle still lends. But it is no longer a crowd of individual investors putting money into your loan, and that single change decides who will consider you, what security they will ask for, and how long the whole thing takes.

Where should you start?

Is Peer-to-Peer Business Lending Still Available in the UK?

The Short Answer

Peer-to-peer business lending is still available in the UK, but the market is smaller and far more specialised than it was before 2020. The mainstream unsecured model contracted sharply, and most of what survives is either secured on property or funded by a mix of individual and institutional money. Funding Circle still lends to UK businesses, but it has not run a retail P2P marketplace since March 2022. We checked every platform on this page against its own live pages on 20 August 2026.

What Counts as Genuine P2P Lending?

The phrase “peer-to-peer” has been stretched until it covers almost any lender with a decent website, which is why so much of what you will read about this market is wrong. It is worth being strict, because the definition decides whose money you are actually borrowing and what happens to your loan if the platform stops trading. There are four structures, and we have sorted every platform on this page into one of them by where its money comes from, not by how the application feels or how the platform describes itself.

• P2P platform. Individual investors choose to fund your loan, under agreements between them and you. The platform arranges the loan and collects the payments, but the money belongs to the investors.
• Hybrid P2P. Individual investors’ money sits alongside institutional or lending-partner capital in the same book. CrowdProperty puts it plainly: funding “blends institutional capital with retail investment” (crowdproperty.com, checked 20 August 2026).
• Direct or institutional lender. A fund, a bank, or the lender’s own balance sheet provides the money and there is no marketplace at all. Funding Circle has worked this way since 2022.
• Broker or marketplace. The platform introduces you to other lenders and does not lend you anything itself.

The trap is assuming that “online”, “fintech” or “alternative” means peer-to-peer. Those words describe how you apply. Peer-to-peer describes where the money comes from, and only the second of those affects your loan.

UK P2P Business Lending Status, Checked August 2026

We checked each platform below against its own live borrower, investor and regulatory pages on 20 August 2026. These are verified examples rather than a complete census of the FCA Register: we have not run one, and we are not going to replace one wrong platform count with another. An earlier version of this page named a specific pair of survivors and stopped there. That was far too narrow, and correcting it is the main reason this update exists.

Read the firm reference numbers carefully. Each one is the number the platform publishes about itself, which is why we have recorded them as provider-stated rather than confirmed against the FCA Register. Those are two different checks and only one of them has been done here. Before you send any platform money, documents or a security valuation, look the number up yourself at register.fca.org.uk: it takes about a minute and it is the single most useful minute you will spend on this.

Sources: each platform’s own borrower, investor and regulatory pages, checked 20 August 2026. Volumes and rates are provider-reported. Not an FCA Register census.

How to Tell if a Platform Is Actually P2P

One question settles it, and you can ask it of any lender in about ten seconds: can an individual investor choose to put their own money into business loans through this platform?

• Yes. It is peer-to-peer, or hybrid P2P if institutional money sits alongside the individuals.
• No: the money comes from banks or funds. It is a direct lender. The loan may well be the better one; it simply is not peer-to-peer, and the protections and wind-down arrangements work differently.
• The platform only passes you on to other lenders. It is a broker, however slick the application looks.

Which Platforms Still Lend to Businesses

rebuildingsociety.com

This is the closest thing left to the original idea: a Leeds marketplace where individual lenders fund loans to ordinary trading businesses rather than property projects. It advertises borrowing of £25,000 to £250,000, and rates from 4% a year where you can offer security (rebuildingsociety.com, checked 20 August 2026). It also reports just over £35m lent since 2013, which tells you the scale honestly: this is a small operation, and a large loan can take longer to fill here than a bank would take to turn you down.

Its existence matters more than its size, though. Any account of this market that says the survivors are all property lenders is simply wrong, and rebuildingsociety.com is the reason. We rate it as the clearest surviving example of the original model: if you want individual investors funding an ordinary business loan, this is where that still happens.

Folk2Folk

Folk2Folk is the largest retail P2P lender to UK businesses still trading, and it is also the one most often described inaccurately, including on this page, until now. It is not an agricultural lender. Its own borrower pages describe it as sector agnostic, and it markets loans for starting a business, buying one, buying out a partner or shareholder, fitting out premises and covering the first months of working capital (folk2folk.com/borrow/, checked 20 August 2026).

We got this wrong for a long time, and it is worth saying so plainly. If you read the previous version of this guide and ruled Folk2Folk out because you run a restaurant or a haulage firm, that was our error rather than theirs.

What it does insist on is security. Loans start at £100,000, run from six months to five years on interest-only terms, and are capped at 60% of the value of UK land or property that is not your home. The sector rarely rules you out; the absence of a property almost always does. That is the whole shape of the proposition, and it is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on the application.

Folk2Folk does not publish a borrower rate. Its investors currently receive 8.50% a year (folk2folk.com, checked 20 August 2026), and your cost sits above that, because the arrangement fee, any ongoing administration charge and the legal and Land Registry work all come on top. Ask for the total in pounds over the full term rather than a monthly percentage. A commercial mortgage broker will quote you that way as a matter of course, and you cannot compare the two until Folk2Folk does the same.

CrowdProperty

CrowdProperty lends to SME property developers, and it is no longer a purely retail platform. Its own description is that funding “blends institutional capital with retail investment” (crowdproperty.com/about/, checked 20 August 2026), which makes it hybrid rather than peer-to-peer in the original sense. For you as a borrower that changes very little. For anyone trying to work out where the surviving retail market actually sits, it changes a good deal, because CrowdProperty is routinely counted as evidence that pure retail P2P is healthier than it is.

The platform publishes cumulative figures: £918m of property funded, £458m lent, 3,902 homes and £304.89m of capital and interest repaid (crowdproperty.com/statistics/, provider-reported, checked 20 August 2026). It also publishes Outcomes Statements setting out how individual projects have performed. A previous version of this page said aggregate performance data was not available and that this limited independent verification. That was wrong, and we have removed it.

Loanpad

Loanpad shows how blurred this category has become. Its loans are “shared between investors on our platform and lending partners” (loanpad.com, checked 20 August 2026), so individual money and partner money fund the same book, on the same loans. It lends for bridging, development and general business purposes, secured by a first charge on property, up to 75% of value, over terms of three to twenty-four months, from 9% a year.

Publishing a rate at all puts Loanpad ahead of most of this list. Treat 9% as the best rate it gives anybody rather than the rate you will be offered.

Sourced Capital

Sourced Capital is the trading name of Peer Funding Limited, which is authorised to operate an electronic system in relation to lending: the regulator’s own term for peer-to-peer (sourcedcapital.co, checked 20 August 2026). Individual investors fund property conversions and refurbishments, and recent listed projects ran from £63,400 to £307,200, so the ticket sizes are genuinely small-developer scale. It publishes nothing about borrower pricing, so you will have to ask before you can compare it with anything.

CapitalStackers

CapitalStackers fills a narrow and quite specific gap: the difference between what a bank will lend a developer and what the development actually costs. Investors lend directly to the borrower through the platform, sitting behind the bank’s senior debt (capitalstackers.com, checked 20 August 2026). If your scheme is already part-funded and short, this is the shape of lender you want. If you need the whole facility from one place, it is not, and no amount of enthusiasm on the application will change that.

easyMoney

easyMoney is the trading name of E-Money Capital Ltd and runs a property-backed P2P platform that is open to retail investors, with an Innovative Finance ISA alongside it. Investor returns are advertised at 5.4% to 9.5% a year (easymoney.com, checked 20 August 2026). There is a live borrower route for property lending, but no published borrower pricing, which is the pattern across almost all of this market.

Kuflink

Kuflink needs a correction. The FCA restricted it from taking on new retail investors in August and again in November 2025, and this page reported it as effectively closed for new business. That restriction has since been lifted. When we checked on 20 August 2026, Kuflink was openly registering new investors and advertising returns of up to 10.26% a year (kuflink.com). It lends on bridging and development, secured on property.

You will still find a wind-down plan on its site, and it is easy to read that as a firm in trouble. It is not: every P2P platform has to hold one, and publishing it is a regulatory requirement rather than a warning sign.

Relendex

Relendex lends £750,000 to £6m to established SME housebuilders and developers over six months to three years, and reports more than £180m lent since 2017 (relendex.com, checked 20 August 2026). It describes its model as fractionalised lending rather than peer-to-peer, and it is aimed at experienced investors rather than the general public. For borrowers it is a specialist route at the larger end, not somewhere a first development is likely to get funded.

Which Former Platforms Left the Retail Market

In every case below the brand outlived the funding model, which is where most of the confusion in this market comes from. A company that stopped being peer-to-peer rarely announced it loudly, and some of them are still lending perfectly happily today under a completely different structure. Knowing which is which saves you from applying to a platform expecting terms it stopped offering years ago.

Funding Circle

Funding Circle is the clearest example of the split. It closed its retail investor platform permanently in March 2022 and now lends using institutional capital, including a £300m arrangement with Barclays and TPG Angelo Gordon announced in February 2024. It reports £18bn lent to more than 135,000 UK businesses (fundingcircle.com, checked 20 August 2026).

An earlier version of this page said Funding Circle had funded over £10bn through retail investors specifically. We could not find that figure in any current Funding Circle source, so we have taken it out. The £18bn total covers all its lending, retail and institutional together, and using it to support a claim about the retail share would be exactly the kind of stretch this page is meant to catch.

The current borrower product runs from £10,000 to £750,000 over terms up to six years, with rates from 6.9% a year and no charge for settling early. Eligibility is one year’s trading (fundingcircle.com, checked 20 August 2026). This page said two years for a long time, which will have discouraged businesses that were in fact eligible: if you were one of them, it is worth another look.

Zopa

Zopa closed its peer-to-peer business in December 2021 and now operates as a bank. It never lent to businesses at any real scale, so the exit mattered far more to investors than to borrowers. It remains the name people most often assume is still peer-to-peer.

RateSetter

Metro Bank bought RateSetter’s loan book in 2020 and the platform closed to investors. The site still runs, but only so existing customers can manage a loan they already have: it stopped taking applications, and it was a personal-loan brand rather than a business lender in any case.

Assetz Capital

Assetz Capital told retail investors in December 2022 that it was closing its retail lending model. New lending moved to institutional funding and the existing retail book was run down. It was the last of the large unsecured SME marketplaces to go, and its exit is the point at which the mainstream model can fairly be called finished.

ThinCats

ThinCats moved to institutional funding years before Shawbrook Bank acquired it, completing in September 2025. It lends in the mid-market rather than to small businesses, so for most readers here it is a name to recognise rather than a route to try.

The UK P2P Exit Timeline

We traced each exit to its own announcement, because they are routinely collapsed into one event and they were not. The reasons changed as the sequence went on. Regulation raised the cost of holding retail investors, rising savings rates removed the reason those investors were there, and institutional money turned out to be cheaper to administer than thousands of individuals with ISA accounts and questions.

How P2P Business Lending Works

The mechanics are simpler than the market around them. You apply to the platform, which underwrites the loan and sets a rate. The loan is then listed for individual investors to fund, either by choosing it themselves or through an automatic allocation across many loans. Once it is fully funded the money is drawn down and you repay the platform, which passes the interest to the investors and keeps a fee for arranging and administering everything.

The part that matters to you is that the credit risk sits with the investors rather than the platform. That is what makes a P2P loan a P2P loan, and it explains two things you will notice as a borrower: funding is not instant, because the loan has to fill, and security tends to be non-negotiable, because it is what makes the loan sellable to investors in the first place. A bank can price risk and absorb it. A platform has to persuade someone else to take it on, and we think that single difference explains more about how these lenders behave than anything on their marketing pages.

If you default, the platform pursues recovery on the investors’ behalf, which, on a property-secured loan, means enforcing the charge and selling the asset. That process is slower than most borrowers expect, and it is also why these platforms care so much about the valuation.

What P2P Business Lending Costs

Interest and the Rate You Are Actually Quoted

Almost nobody in this market publishes a borrower rate. Loanpad quotes from 9% a year and rebuildingsociety.com quotes from 4% where security is offered; the rest quote individually, which means the honest answer for most platforms on this page is not publicly disclosed: quote required. We would rather say that than invent a market-wide range, because a range assembled from platforms that lend for completely different purposes tells you nothing you can use.

Where a rate is advertised, we found it is the best rate the lender gives anybody. Funding Circle’s 6.9% is described on its own calculator as the average rate for its lowest-risk businesses. Your quote comes after underwriting, and if your trading record or credit history is mixed, it can be materially higher.

Arrangement, Completion and Exit Fees

The interest rate is rarely the expensive part, and Funding Circle’s own worked example makes the point better than any argument could. On a £100,000 loan, its calculator shows a completion fee of £6,900 against interest of £8,668, for a total repayable of £115,568 (fundingcircle.com, checked 20 August 2026). The fee is nearly as large as the interest, and it is added to your balance on acceptance, so you pay interest on it too.

An earlier version of this page described that completion fee as 1.5% to 6%, typically around 3.5%. We could not support those figures from any current Funding Circle source, and the provider’s own best-case example sits above the top of the range we had published. We have removed the range rather than leave a number on the page that the lender’s own calculator contradicts.

On a property-secured P2P loan there is more to add: the arrangement fee, a valuation, your own legal costs and the lender’s, Land Registry charges, and sometimes an exit or extension fee if the loan runs past its term. Ask for the total repayable in pounds, over the full term, with every fee included. If a platform will not give you that, you cannot compare it to a commercial mortgage. Treat the reluctance as information.

Why Investor Returns Are Not Borrower Rates

This is the single most common mistake made about peer-to-peer lending, and it is easy to make because both numbers are percentages sitting on the same website. Folk2Folk advertises 8.50% a year. That is what the investor receives, not what the borrower pays. The platform’s own margin, the arrangement fee and the third-party costs all sit between the two.

So if you are comparing a P2P quote against a bank loan, make sure you are comparing the two borrower costs. An investor return is the wrong number, and using it will make P2P look cheaper than it is by a margin you cannot afford to guess at.

Who Can Borrow

We compared the published borrower criteria across every platform in the table and found no shared standard, so anyone offering you one is generalising from a single lender. What they do have in common is that security carries more weight than it did in the unsecured era, and that most of them are lending against property rather than against your trading performance.

• Security. Folk2Folk needs a first charge on UK land or property that is not your home, to 60% of value. Loanpad goes to 75%. The property platforms lend against the scheme itself. rebuildingsociety.com will lend unsecured but prices it accordingly.
• Trading history. Folk2Folk will fund a start-up or a business purchase if the property security is there, which is a genuine difference from most alternative lenders. Funding Circle needs one year. The property platforms care about your development experience rather than your accounts.
• Personal guarantees. Provider-specific and common on anything unsecured. A personal guarantee makes you liable if the business cannot pay, whatever the loan is called: “unsecured” describes the absence of a charge over an asset, not the absence of personal exposure. Read that clause before you sign anything, and take advice if the wording is not clear.
• Loan size. The gap in this market sits below £100,000 and above roughly £250,000 without property. If that is where you are, a P2P platform is unlikely to be the answer.

P2P vs Institutional Business Lending

For most borrowers the practical differences are speed, security and how much the decision depends on a person. An institutional lender is working from its own balance sheet, so it can decide quickly and does not need to wait for a loan to fill: Funding Circle advertises a decision in as little as an hour. A P2P platform has to fund the loan from investors, which takes days at best and longer on a large or unusual case.

What you get in exchange is a lender that will look at the security rather than the shape of your business. If you have been trading eight months, or your last two years look odd for a reason that takes explaining, an automated institutional decision is likely to go against you. A property-secured P2P lender may still be interested, because the asset is doing most of the work.

Cost is genuinely hard to compare, and we could not do it fairly from published information alone. Anyone telling you one route is cheaper is guessing. Institutional lenders publish rates and charge large arrangement fees. P2P lenders publish almost nothing and price case by case. The only way to settle it is to get both quotes as a total repayable figure and put them side by side.

Is P2P Business Lending Safe?

What the FCA Regulates

Peer-to-peer lending is a regulated activity. The permission is called operating an electronic system in relation to lending, and the FCA also refers to the sector as loan-based crowdfunding: if you see that phrase on a platform’s regulatory page, it means the same thing. Authorisation covers how the platform runs the loans, discloses risk and treats its customers, and we checked that wording against the FCA’s own guidance rather than the platforms’ summaries of it. It does not mean the regulator has assessed any individual loan, and it is not a view on whether the platform is any good.

On the investor side, P2P sits inside the restricted mass market investment rules. Platforms have to display the standard high-risk warning, and they must run an appropriateness assessment before an ordinary retail investor can put money in. You will have seen the result if you have ever tried to open an account: the warning about being prepared to lose money is not a formality the platform chose to add.

Why the FSCS Does Not Cover This

P2P investments are not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and this has not changed. The FSCS deposit limit rose from £85,000 to £120,000 on 1 December 2025, but that applies to money held on deposit with a bank, building society or credit union. It does not extend to peer-to-peer loans, and no amount of ISA wrapper changes that: an Innovative Finance ISA alters the tax treatment of the interest, not the risk to the capital.

If you are lending through one of these platforms and a borrower defaults, there is no compensation scheme to fall back on. Recovery depends on the security, if there is any, and on how long enforcement takes. We checked: every platform on this page says so on its own site, usually in the first banner you see.

What Happens if a Platform Fails

Your loans do not vanish if the platform stops trading. FCA rules require P2P firms to have arrangements in place for the continued administration of the loan book if they cease to operate, so that repayments keep being collected and enforcement can still happen. How that is implemented varies between platforms (some name a third-party servicer, others plan to run the book down themselves), and the previous version of this page was wrong to describe a backup servicer as a universal requirement.

What is consistent is that the transition is not smooth. Repayments can be delayed, and the costs of running the wind-down come out of the book. Read the platform’s wind-down arrangements before you commit money, not after something has gone wrong. If a platform you have money with does run into trouble, check the FCA Register for notices at register.fca.org.uk, find who is administering the book, and use the FCA consumer helpline on 0800 111 6768 to confirm the firm’s current status.

Who P2P Business Lending Suits

It suits you if you own UK land or commercial property that is not your home and need to borrow against it, particularly where a bank has said no for a reason that is about your business rather than about the asset. It suits property developers and small housebuilders, which is where most of the surviving capacity has ended up. And it suits an ordinary trading business wanting £25,000 to £250,000 from individual investors, though rebuildingsociety.com is close to being the only place that still happens at any scale.

It does not suit you if you have no property to offer and want less than £100,000, which is precisely the gap the old unsecured marketplaces used to fill and nobody has replaced. It does not suit a business in genuine distress, because these lenders price that risk or decline it. And it does not suit anyone who needs a facility to draw on and repay repeatedly: every product on this page is a fixed-term loan, and none of them is an overdraft substitute.

We rate P2P business lending, as it now stands, as a security-led market rather than a route for businesses the banks have simply overlooked. If you have the asset, it is worth a conversation. If you do not, start with the alternatives below rather than working through a table of lenders that will all want the same thing you cannot give them.

Alternatives to P2P Business Lending

Start from the problem rather than the product. Most businesses that arrive at peer-to-peer lending are solving one of a handful of problems, and we would send you elsewhere for most of them.

If you are not sure which of those you are, the alternative finance decision guide works through it by cash problem, and the alternative business funding guide explains what each product actually is.

Peer-to-Peer Business Lending FAQs

How We Checked UK P2P Lenders