LendingCrowd, one of the UK’s fastest-growing alternative finance lenders to the SME market, has announced a market-leading offer to investors who are thinking about adding P2P to their investment strategy. By investing £5000, investors will get a 2.5% joining bonus allocated to their accounts and access to a lending platform that achieved an 8.1% rate of return over the last twelve months.

Since launching in 2014, LendingCrowd has facilitated loans totalling over £7m and already has over 2000 investors. Deals range in size from £20,000 to over £1m, and in 2015 LendingCrowd helped Diet Chef complete one of the biggest ever peer-to-business deals seen in the UK in a £1.5m debt finance transaction.

LendingCrowd has a highly experienced credit assessment team, including Ian Cunningham, a former Head of Corporate and Commercial Credit at RBS. LendingCrowd only lends to creditworthy businesses using similar criteria to the high street banks and assesses every loan on a case-by-case basis. Because capital is at risk in common with the rest of the P2P market, the platform encourages investors to help diversify their risk by spreading investments over a number of loans of which there are currently 70 available.

CEO and co-founder, Stuart Lunn, said: “The platform has achieved a great rate of return over the last year, with numbers that compare very favourably to other P2P lenders in the UK and internationally. Our investor base is telling us that as well as being happy taking on risk to achieve a rate of return that beats most other investments, there is a real satisfaction level involved in the process of supporting the growth of some of our most exciting SMEs.”