Suggestions for newbie

Welcome to the forum 

What level of return are you looking for?

I'm sure many suggestions will come, but I use Bondmason for a small piece of mine, current return is 8.46% on one count and 7.69% on my better halves account, this is after the 1% fee.

As with anything, it has its pros and cons, But communication is good, you have a diversified loan book and for a hands off approach the returns in my opinion are decent, take a look at their sub board: p2pindependentforum.com/board/94/bondmason

6% on a saver account! That is phenomenal! Leave what you have in there and start fresh with P2P, to spread your risk. The HSBC will be very low risk and P2p will be medium risk at best, depending on where you lodge it. 

Assetz have a reasonable record, as do Savingstream and Thincats. There are so many to choose from. Risk is usually the decider - can the platform recover capital when a loan defaults?. Most have difficulty unless they are operating like a pawn shop, CollateralUK for instance, where security is physically lodged with the platform.
Criteria:
1.Risk - how likely are you to see your capital returned if the loan defaults.
2.Return - ties in with risk - generally lower perceived risk is lower return
3.Security - Try to avoid personal guarantees, they are worthless in a court of law, where defaulted loans usually end up. Go for security on property - either high value items lodged with the platform or FIRST debenture on houses, buildings or land.
4. Ease of use - is there an auto lend function? Some platforms do automatic portfolios and others do pre-funding, like SavingStream. Personally I avoid the fully automatic ones. Filters are also a good feature of some platforms, giving you the choice of what you want, removing those that don't meet your criteria - Mintos for example.

5. If you look further afield into Europe - Mintos have a guaranteed capital return if a loan goes into default more than 60 days (available on selected loans) and also have an excellent secondary market, which will remove dead-time, where money is not earning interest and also has a VERY small minimum buy.

Happy New year and Happy lending!

Thincats wouldn't be much use to you as I believe their minimum investment is £1000 per loan, neither would Bridgecrowd where the minimum investment is £5000 per loan. Sites like Saving Stream (SS), Collateral and MoneyThing (MT) allow very small investments, down to a penny in SS and Collateral but no pence only £1 min in MT. However, SS is the only one with a pre-fund (minimum £100, but you could just sell off some immediately each time), the others rely on being on-line at a fixed time for new loans. I would suggest diversifying across loans on a platform either automatically (platform blended) or manually, although I wouldn't get too hung up about the number of platforms myself. 

However, if your cash isn't really 'spare' or you cannot afford to lose (all or some) of your investment I'm not sure I would recommend P2P. There are other high street banks that offer regular savings accounts of 5%, Nationwide has one offering 5% on max £500 pm for example, most of these may be time limited (one year only) and require opening more bank accounts and swirling your money around from one to the other each month, but I'd suggest you max all those out first before putting anything left into P2P.

In Edit: X-posted with petebutt43 about the Thincats minimum investment level.

Whilst the above is true... the same logic applies to peer to peer in that you only get interest on cash invested. £100 per month going into for example AC QAA @3.75% would earn less after a year than going into the 5% nationwide regular saver account mentioned above.

For people at the smaller end of the 'amount to invest' scale, I would suggest filling at least one if not several of the 5% Fscs supported regular savers first (there are 4 currently available) after having the normal 3-6-12 months cash on hand for living expenses. Only after both of those are done would I consider investing in products which could have up to 100% capital loss.

The difference is a regular saver ends after a year so you can never get the headline rate. I think these are misleading.

The P2P investment could potentially keep going for much longer. For each sum invested, after a year you would get the headline rate (assuming no losses).

I was suggesting a higher percentage product to offset the risk.

While I wouldn't invest in a regular saver myself, I do agree it's a much safer option and more suitable for those with smaller sums to invest. 

I'm no big hitter by typical definitions but I have and will continue to lend 5% or sometimes more of my total investable assets in one loan or to one borrower across many loans where the deal seems good enough. In one case I put perhaps 10% into one secured loan paying 1.5% a month on a beta deal. I took the view that the security and circumstances were worthwhile for the amount involved. I don't typically do this, takes interesting loan properties, not always higher interest rate.