Your experience as a retail investor

The market has shrunk so is my p2p investment. It's easier because my current portfolio requires very little management comparing to how it was some years ago.

I think most of functioning platforms still value retail base. Those who don't, have already changed direction or ceased.   

First question - what do you mean by P2P? Platforms with the specific regulatory permission or the wider altfi loan crowdfunding sector.

Break-even by diversifying across platforms but that's not the point is it. Shame is, it could be an fun / interesting challenge which should bring reward for work. The failure point I can see is personalities and who is running the company - which you don't get to find out until it's too late ... If it weren't for Lendy, I'd say it was OK - thankfully didn't enter into similar others. FCA interim accreditation extremely misleading to retail investors.

I've invested in several P2P platforms since 2014. At first, it felt like a niche marketplace and was producing returns of over 10%. There was a huge surge in lending in 2016-18 which seemed to coincide with FCA regulation which went hand in hand with IFISA approval.

It has become clear that retail investors were lured into believing that P2P lending was properly regulated by the FCA, this proved to be false. The FCA warnings implied that the risks of P2P lending were dependent on each individual loan. By spreading lending across hundreds of loans the losses on loans that failed would be covered by the good loans.

What actually transpired is that the platforms are the weak point and the costs of recovering a loan book are high. This is because the rules of a company in administration don't work well for P2P platforms. This was an FCA oversight which has severely affected my view of the P2P market. The FCA still fails to recognise its failings and therefore my investor sentiment has been severely dented. I don't see a recovery until the FCA compensates the costs of platform failure and their failure to regulate platforms properly. The first step should be to insure lenders against the costs of platform failure. Instead the FCA are trying to shirk their responsibilities to retail lenders. I don't think the P2P industry will recover, and I don't think the FCA, banks or government want it to thrive.

Mug.

I started to invest waste my money in p2p around the start of 2017.

I thought much like stocks and shares etc the platform itself, so long as FCA regulated, was very safe. As with stocks/shares/funds/etc I knew the individual loans were very risky and I was prepared for that. I wasn't prepared for the platforms themselves going under and I lost a fair amount of money when three platforms I was invested did so.

I am not super rich and this cash was the result of a lifetime of savings.

The experience has made me question the UK financial system. Are stockbrokers safe? Are banks safe? I honestly don't know anymore. My previous view was that anything properly authorised by the FCA should be pretty safe. But three FCA regulated platforms going under? I now keep most of my savings abroad as I can't trust the UK system anymore.