The LendInvest story
Shaping the future of property finance since 2008
In late 2008, as global financial markets crashed, our founders, Christian
Faes and Ian Thomas, saw an opportunity to fill a critical gap in short-term property finance.
They set up a mortgage lending business (then called Montello Bridging Finance), which quickly became one of the leading short-term finance lenders in the UK.
By 2012, we had launched two regulated funds to finance our loans, and were managing £30m of investors’ capital. As demand grew, we looked for ways to help our customers invest more efficiently.
In 2013, we brought the investment experience online – LendInvest was born. We launched our online investment platform, allowing our investors to build their own tailored portfolios of property-backed loan investments.
We then brought fintech’s first retail bond programme to the public markets, listing the first tranche of a £500m retail bond programme on the London Stock Exchange in August 2017.
Later that year, we launched into the buy-to-let market, with a product tailored to professional portfolio landlords, taking us into the longer-term and more mainstream mortgage market.
And in September 2018 we completed our Series C funding round, raising £30.5m from investors including Atomico, GP Bullhound and Tiger Management, and pushing our fundraising total well over £1bn.
We’re a well-capitalised, profitable business, delivering value as one of the fastest-growing fintechs in the country, and we’ve got the backing to continue investing in our technology and providing property finance that is fast, online and for all.
A diverse capital base built to last.
Having a healthy mix of investors is critical to any lending business to operate and grow sensibly. This provides certainty of funding to our borrowers, whilst delivering great returns to our investors.
Our investors include many UK and international institutions. The due diligence they perform before they commit to investing with us is a serious endorsement of the quality of our systems and ethos.
Risk management underpins everything we do.
We make lending decisions based on years of experience. Our hands-on, mortgage market expertise is essential when it comes to assessing a loan application and creating the best investment proposition.
- doneEvery loan we fund is secured against registered UK property.
- doneOur approach to risk is two-fold: first we assess the borrower, then the property. If we’re not fully satisfied by both, we won’t lend.
- doneOur loans are underwritten by a team of mortgage professionals with over 100 years’ industry experience.
- doneOur loan servicing has received the highest rating from ARC Ratings, the European credit agency, for four years running.
Chief Credit Risk Officer
25-year mortgage market veteran
“Risk management isn’t only a priority for our investors. Our borrowers count on us to assess the risks of the loans we make carefully too. Putting credit quality at the heart of what we do means everything to all of us.”