Rens Ramaekers

• 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.

• Lüth said Raisin is working on developing EFTs with passive fund giant Vanguard while Aikens said Prodigy Finance is looking at different fund structures very closely.
• Newsome said that two forms of private debt have sprung up. First is $850bn and more mid market private equity based and the second is platform based lending being $50-100bn. He added that a type of ‘fund of platforms’ could happen soon to help the latter grow.
• Ramaekers said Aegon are planning a long run investment in the private credit space but that it can takes a while before actually buying the first loan in a platform. “It was a year before we deployed money after first meeting Funding Circle for the first time,” he said.

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