Squirrel waiting on P2P licence

New Zealand’s brave new world of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending has another new entrant ready and waiting in the wings.

Friday, May 29th 2015, 12:00AM

by Miriam Bell

Squirrel Mortgages is going through the final stages of getting its P2P lending licence from the Financial Markets Authority (FMA).

The company’s principal John Bolton said that, all going well with the FMA, they are pretty close to getting there and, once they do, they have everything ready to go.

“We have an in-house built platform that we have developed from scratch, which gives us a huge amount of flexibility to adapt to the market and its needs.”

The platform has been completed and is currently going through the testing phase.

Bolton said this means Squirrel can launch their P2P service as soon as they receive their licence.

“Depending on if and when we get a licence, we could actually be the second P2P lender to market – because we already have everything ready to launch.”

Much like the country’s first P2P lender, Harmoney, Squirrel plans to focus on smaller scale consumer finance loans for such things as cars or renovation work.

Bolton said they will be offering secured loans of up to $70,000 and unsecured loans of up to $35,000.

“The consumer market is our focus because it ties in with the rest of our business. But we will evolve with the market as it progresses.”

He hopes that the service will be up and running later this year.

To date, the FMA has issued two P2P lending licences – one to Harmoney last year and one to LendMe in mid-May.

Harmoney is already in operation while LendMe is about three months away from a hard launch of its platform and services.

Landlords.co.nz understands that Wayne Croad, who is the managing director of Finance Direct, is also going through the P2P licence application process for his business Lending Crowd.

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