How much money is each British P2P platform making / losing?

Good to see someone looking at this oft-neglected aspect. Just one thing explorep2p , think your figs for FundingSecure are rather out of date (filing in Apr paints a different picture). For clarity when's the filing cut-off date your analysis is based on? 

Thanks for looking at this in any case, & agree with some of your comments (but not the all-too-usual bias towards the mega-giga scaling model imho). I think it's perfectly possible to build a profitable niche platform with smaller numbers than you suggest, & believe those well-managed operators that can do this have & will be filing the figures to support this view.

On places like this full of pesky lenders we often like that type of platform because (so far) many of them have been offering us better returns than the big (or rapidly growing boys)..

Jury also still out (for me, at least on the valuation) on giants like FC which (iirc) have reported losses in excess of their turnover in the past (don't follow but if so a point sufficiently important to perhaps be worth a mention in your comments?) Z as you say many years of losses, so there's not exactly a thick roster of profit-making trailblazers that the smaller guys can look up to.

tagging fundingsecure  MoneyThing

Useful analysis. Clearly there could be a significant issue with how stale the P&L data is for some platforms.  

What this isn't answering for me is why so many platforms struggle to generate profits. I really can't think of an area of finance where margins are sometimes so huge. Yes, Lendy and LendInvest are profitable but when you consider that Lendy/SS charge a 6% spread and 6% in fees and LI charge borrowers say 14% but give their Lenders just 6-7%, then I'm asking why aren't they vastly more profitable? FC has originated billions in loans but hasn't turned a profit (albeit I think I saw that that might be changing when their most recent accounts get published). Even the biggest of them all, LendingClub, who has originated tens of billions, is not really generating decent profits. Is it that there are too many other mouths to feed in the chain (introducing brokers, underwriters etc). Is it that offering a platform to retail is just very expensive in terms of say headcount? I do notice that P2P platforms seem to have a huge staff roster compared to say an equivalent small fund manager, despite the fact the fund manager may well be dealing in far more complex products across many currencies (and doing all the settlements this entails). 

My view is increasingly that P2P platforms are not offering the lender (who is taking all the risk, unlike the platform which takes none) enough participation in the rate the borrower is paying. Early on I accepted that a platform needed to take extra margin to pay for startup costs. I would have expected, however, that profits should risen rapidly once volumes picked up, allowing them to give lenders higher participation. The whole investment proposition of FinTech is that they can scale volumes without scaling costs. Instead it seems that costs simply scale with volumes. 

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It was to us too. If the Altfi volume data is correct (very low current volumes) then things are not looking super rosy.

Good work and definitely an area worth highlighting and reviewing regularly.

stuartassetzcapital said in a video interview that AC had broken into profit recently and MoneyThing stated on this forum that they were also profitable. Obviously both later data points than official fillings but potentially worthy of note?

Of more amusing value, Li must be the most profitable p2p platform in the universe if they have overtaken Lendy. Congratulations to them!

Yup, AC were profitable over the last financial year and continue to be profitable in this financial year.  I'm not sure what has been made public so don't really want to say more but it may be worth asking our lender support team for an official statement on the matter.

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Hi, that is absolutely correct, but as we noted in the post we consider anything +/- £300k is effectively breakeven.

Nothing illegal I'm sure, but when a biz sees that it's model is working they don't have to wait for the profits they can, especially if they're small and in a growing business field as p2p is(?), reinvest that income flow back in thus delaying profits. Amazon can't seem to stop themselves doing this.