P2P lending: an un-Christmassy story By Manos Schizas from ACCA's SME Unit

In our last blogpost for 2013, ACCA’s senior economic analyst, Manos Schizas, talks about trying his hand at lending directly to SMEs – and watches one of his borrowers fail.
I was extremely pleased to host ACCA’s Alternative Finance conference back in March 2013. It was an opportunity to showcase some of the most innovative finance providers in the UK, and it was exciting to see professional accountants work out the implications of their offering for themselves and the businesses they worked for.
But here at ACCA’s SME Unit we’d like to think we’re not all talk, so I have since opened accounts with a number of peer-to-peer consumer and business lending platforms, and have recently started to invest in the latter in earnest. As part of a wider portfolio of loans, I recently bought sixty pounds’ worth of the debt of a company that I shall call Space Odyssey Ltd (not their actual name of course). This may not sound like much but P2P platforms and elementary finance textbooks both stress that it’s important to diversify when investing, and I sure am glad I did in this case.