Alison Harwood

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• Mark asserted that the talent pool in property lending is now ‘in the alternative space’. He also said of platforms that get pricing and risk wrong: “The speed at which they came is the speed at which they’ll go.”

• Uma said that alternative property lenders have to adapt their position in the market based on where we are in the property cycle.

• James said that the interest rate cycle ‘is not going back to the way it was’ and that this opens up opportunities for alternative lenders to attract investment.

• Marek said that EstateGuru’s main value proposition is that it allows investors to build a property portfolio that is diversified by geography.

• The 22-strong roundtable discussed various aspects of opportunities in the non-bank lending space including the opportunities in SME lending, the maturity of the market and the sustainability of some platforms' business models and the need for greater transparency.
• Christian Gut, manager of the P2P lending Fund, said investors need to fully understand track records of managers/funds and of how loans are performing. He said it is “really hard to understand” like-for-like comparisons when platform are changing underwriting models.  “Every country and platform is doing things in different ways. The industry should decide a certain level of credit and risk that should exist across the aboard,” he said.
• Maseco’s Matthews added that niches are well suited to alternative credit but  “you can’t throw a lot of money” at them as this would harm yields.
• RM’s Nicholl’s said that trust in the sector could be improved by third party audits leading to more capital into the sector.
• AltFi Data’s Fekete added that lenders are showing more and more interest in having their data assessed and compared on a like-for-like basis. That is a vital part of the maturation of the sector, he said.