P2P Money Blog

Two more peer-to-peer lending platforms have received full authorisation from the FCA today.  The first of these today was Ablrate.

Here is the article on the Ablrate website:

We are pleased to announce that Aviation and Tech Capital Limited, the company that owns and operates Ablrate has gained full authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority. 

We have spent many long hours creating appropriate safe guards for lenders and borrowers and we have developed new and innovative systems to ensure transparency. All of these have been looked at by the FCA and have been approved. 

Our agreement system, that creates your own bespoke lending agreement all the way through your ownership of that loan, was created to show that Ablrate loans are between you and the borrower as they should be. Some platform have chosen to have documentation and terms and conditions covering the relationship between the borrower and the lender, we chose to make it a physical solution with an agreement system that can be audited by our lenders.

Regulation is necessary, and to be affective regulation has to be adaptive. This has been a challenge for platforms with different models and a challenge for the FCA facing those different models. I have to thank my team for meeting this challenge, working long hours and putting up with a grumpy CEO on many occasions. It would also be remiss of me not to praise the professionalism and pragmatism of the regulator. The people we dealt with in all sections of the FCA have been helpful and professional, this gives us the confidence to be able to innovate, which is what our sector thrives upon, without fear of banging our heads up against a regulatory wall!

The most important people to thank is really you, our community. You have been quick to give us feedback, both positive and negative, this has allowed us to shape our procedures, our systems and technology to a stage where the regulator wants us to be; managing risk, being clear and fair, treating customers fairly but also bringing something new and exciting to the market place.

This is a big day for our company and our community, but it's just the start. We are now able to plan better, innovate better, expand faster, and do this to the benefit of our existing lenders and borrowers and those who join our community in the future.