People Moves
P2P Lender In UK Appoints Industry Luminary As Special Advisor
This publication carries latest news of moves and hires in global wealth management.
LendInvest, the
peer-to-peer lender focused on property, has appointed Stephan
Wilcke, former executive chairman of OneSavings Bank, as a
special advisor.
Wilcke’s financial services career spans nearly 25 years and
combines a mix of leadership roles at commercial,
government-backed and regulatory institutions. He held the
chairmanship of OneSavings Bank, the FTSE 250 specialist finance
lender, until it became the first challenger bank to hold an IPO
in London in June 2014. After the listing, Wilcke continued to
serve on the bank’s board as a non-executive director until May
2016.
In other roles, he was chief executive of the UK Treasury’s Asset
Protection Agency from 2009 to 2012. The agency helped the
UK’s most troubled banks repair their balance sheets and stem
losses caused by toxic assets.
He is currently a commissioner of the Jersey Financial Services
Commission, and chairman of Amigo Loans, the UK’s guarantor
lending business. He was a former non-executive director of
Greece’s Hellenic Financial Stability Fund.
In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the number of
crowd-funding and peer-to-peer websites as a result of
traditional sources of loans and financing drying up since the
financial crisis as banks seek to minimise risk. In the first
quarter of 2016, cumulative lending of such entities stood
at £5.1 billion, according to the Peer-To-Peer Finance
Association. There are a total of 141,241 lenders.
Peer-to-peer lending focuses on linking companies or individuals that want to borrow money with those that want to lend without using an official financial institution as an intermediary. As a result, peer-to-peer lenders can often offer more competitive borrowing and saving rates as there is no bank acting as a middleman.
Peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding became regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority on 1 April 2014 with the aim of tightening up controls on the sector and to give investors clearer information about what they are investing in to prevent potential abuses.
