Top 10 UK Fintech Lending Companies to Follow in 2021

Banking Circle is a fully licensed bank delivering financial infrastructure you can count on. The firm focuses on financial inclusivity. Staying true to these words, they allow banks to support their clients in domestic or global trading without spending a dime on their own internal infrastructure. Growth, profitability, and speed—that’s Banking Circle’s mantra.

According to UKTN, Banking Circle provides a safer, more faultless payment process by leveraging AI.

Banking Circle provides banks and fintech companies with global payments, settlements, and global forex capabilities—all via a secure banking platform.

Being a member of Banking Circle means opening IBAN accounts in many currencies, customized and low-cost forex transactions, and access to solutions like SWIFT, SEPA, or CHAPS.

This impressive list of services allows entities to optimize supply chains, control business risk, and improve efficiency.

They cooperate with companies like Valitor, Stripe, PaySafe, or Nuevo. You also cannot miss their multiple business awards, including Best Cross-Border Payments Infrastructure of 2020—that really is something!

Interested to learn more? Take a minute to check out their blog about fintech.

Among our 10 noteworthy UK fintech lending companies, we have to mention RateSetter. They’re part of the well-known and award-winning Metro Bank. Their specialization is delivering market-leading personal loans with one specific goal:​​ “to make finance fair.”

Curious to know what else impressed us about RateSetter? Smart Money People, the most reliable financial services review platform, rated them 4.9/5 points! That’s quite the achievement.

You can find car and personal loans as well as debt consolidation in their offer.  The process is simple, personal, and tailored to the clients’ needs. Their dedicated customer service team will be happy to assist you!

According to Trustpilot testimonials, the strengths of this company are quick and hassle-free applications, a transparent process, great simplicity, and highly qualified customer service.

Check out the statistics section on their website. The impressive interest and capital coverage ratios tell us even more than individual testimonials. Just take a look at the total amount lent, which is over 4 billion GBP! On top of that, over 87,000 investors and 706,000 borrowers have already put their trust in RateSetter’s solutions.

Recently, they’ve also been nominated in the Consumer Credit Awards 2021 in the Best Loan Provider category. Well, we’re certainly keeping our fingers crossed for them!

The Yobota platform is a cloud-based alternative to old-fashioned banking. It provides APIs that enable financial institutions to create innovative products and run them in an independent way. Their mission is to provide intelligent, flexible, and customer-centric finances.

Yobota meets all the requirements of a leading core banking solution: it’s cloud-native, flexible, and secure. Plus, the company’s not hesitant to let the world know about it on their social media.

The Yobota platform is a great way to save time and focus on the bigger picture through their customer-tailored solutions. You can start small, observe how it works, test all the features, then hit the market.

Your company can try new add-ons and modify them without extra costs. Yobota’s Simulator Engine can give you possible scenarios about the new products affecting your portfolio. The key here is flexibility—the very spirit of fintech.

We found their demo showcase on Vimeo really interesting. See for yourself!

They keep themselves busy thanks to their cooperation with businesses like LiveLend, Better Borrow, Smart Save, Fronted, or Chetwood.

Yobota also has over 3,000 5-star ratings on Trustpilot!

Time for another game changer. First of all, we are in love with iwoca’s LinkedIn description: “At iwoca, we believe finance should feel like a superpower, not a headache.” So cool!

The company serves mostly small businesses located in the UK. iwoca’s core are loans that are quick, flexible, and effortless. Their loan system is very clear, simple, and quick—staying true to their “finance at your fingertips” approach.

The company offers two main products: Flexi-Loans and iwocaPays. Loans up to 200,000 GBP are fast and come without any fees. You can apply in just a few steps via their website. It only takes about a minute!

Thanks to iwocaPays, you can get your invoices paid faster. Whether your clients choose to Pay Now or Pay Later, you still get your money up front.

iwoca regularly puts out the SME Expert Index. It’s published every other month to provide insights of what’s driving small and medium businesses to borrow money. This index is a perfect view on how the market will be changing after the pandemic.

iwoca is a trusted partner of Xero and also has been working with Time Assist Limited, The Entrepreneurs Circle, and Arfon Consulting. Take a look at the testimonials on their website. Trustpilot rates them at 4.6 points.

We’re hitting the halfway point of our list of notable UK fintech lending companies that are changing the financial world every day, and LendInvest is definitely one of them. Their service is designed for intermediaries, landlords, and developers. So far, LendInvest’s total amount lent is more than 3 billion GBP.

Their products are divided into the three groups we just mentioned above. LendInvest specializes in bridging and development loans—both low-cost, like residential bridging loans, and high-cost, like mortgages. For investors, LendInvest has ready offers based on property-backed loans. Everything is tailored to meet the customers’ needs and plans.

Among others, the big players who trusted LendInvest are CitiGroup, J.P. Morgan, and National Australia Bank. LendInvest has been awarded more than 50 times in the finance category and has earned a really high rating (4.5) on Trustpilot.

What’s also noteworthy is that recently, LendInvest has started collaborating with two banking giants: Barclays and HSBC. It’s a significant boost to the firm.

LANDBAY is a 100% online broker platform. Up to now, they realized 892 million GBP in total lending. Most of it involved properties in Greater London.

Their offer is directed at intermediaries. LANDBAY’s key advantages over the competition are direct access to underwriters, Instant Decision in Principle, and a paper-free process from DIP to completion.

LANDBAY’s core service is P2P lending in buy-to-let mortgages. The firm provides investors with direct access to loans.

What’s more, LANDBAY uses Amazon Web Services and is one of the first platforms offering investors a range of benefits of the Innovative Finance ISA (individual savings account).

LANDBAY’s platform also allows shipping new mortgage products to the market incredibly fast, even in as little as 72 hours.

LANDBAY works with numerous networks, packagers, and clubs. This extensive group includes Primis, Connect Mortgages, Tenet, RHL, CommercialTrust, Synergy Commercial Finance, and TMA.

The company ranked 6th in the Deloitte Fast 50 2020 ranking and 11th in Financial Times’ 5th annual list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies.

It’s high time to bring a fintech solution to the securities business and change its black-and-white reality to be more colorful by tailoring it to the customer’s exact needs. And there’s no one better to do that than Sharegain.

They target fund managers, private banks, online brokers, and digital wealth managers. Sharegain’s job is to make your securities even more valuable and help you unlock new revenue in a transparent and simple way.

Sharegain has three core services: Digital Agency Lending (DAL), Security Lending as a Service (SLaaS), and Securities Lending Tech (SLT). What’s more, they’ve developed a Portfolio Analyzer that allows you to understand the full potential of securities and Exchange Traded Derivatives you manage.

And of course, we couldn’t resist bringing up the BetterLend solution, where the guiding principle is ESG: Environment, Social, and Corporate Governance. But wait, securities and pro-environmental actions? Yes, that’s right!

BetterLend is a service where investors can put their lendings into social and environmental issues like clean water, renewable energy, or accessible education. Now, that’s the kind of fintech we love.

Sharegain is a part of the International Securities Lending Association. The press doesn’t stay quiet about them! You can read about Sharegain in The Banker, The Telegraph, Financial Times, or Securities Lending Times.

And what about their awards? Well, among others, Sharegain has been named one of the top 100 fintech firms in Finance Monthly’s 2021 Fintech Awards.

Newable helps the SME sector thrive based on three pillars: money, advice, and workspace.  Every year, Newable helps over 43,000 companies by offering business or commercial loans, mortgages, professional support, or providing new flexible working spaces for businesses.

Their mission is to “make sustainable profits by helping other businesses to thrive,” with an added bonus of a strong commitment to ESG. Staying true to those words, Newable very recently released EMS—environmental management systems.

Newable’s range of services is impressively broad, beginning with life insurance and finances like commercial mortgages or bridging loans. They also have a wide portfolio of services dedicated to SMEs and investors.

Doing business with Newable means joining a group of over 500 investors, which was recently voted as the UK’s #1 Angel Network. Their investments are focused on medtech, AI, space, robots, and 4IR companies. With that, Newable’s future looks bright indeed.

Newable also offers impartial advice to help your business succeed on the market. They can help with matters related to business modelling, intellectual property, investment pitches—and that’s just a small sampling of their vast range of services.

Lately, they made their first investment in Dancerace and they are part of the Green Mark community. Their Trustpilot rating is 4.8.

However, what’s quite relevant for our company is that they trusted STX Next! Newable Business Finance is one of our clients and we couldn’t be more proud of that.

Divido is a whitelabel retail platform created to connect lenders, retailers, and channel partners, while always keeping partnerships and trusted relationships in mind. It’s an innovative way of controlling and configuring payments. They offer choice, speed, and top-notch UX at the point of sale.

The features created by the company are uniquely tailor-made, taking into account the needs and roles of all three of their target groups in the sales channel.

Divido delivers an omnichannel, multi-geo, and whitelabel platform that is fully configurable to meet fast-changing customer needs. All of this with a trusted, market-known team of experts guiding clients through launch and scaling.

What are the benefits for the lenders? Quick market entry, increasing revenue with transparent pricing, diversification of the lending portfolio, and neutralizing the threat from brands entering the market.

For retailers, cooperation with Divido will result in higher acceptance rates and control of the customer journey.

Divido works with BNP Paribas, Nordea, Nectar, and lastminute.com. The firm has won Best Flexible Retail Finance Platform at the Technology Innovator Awards 2021.

Last but not least, “the home of smart money,” as Assetz Capital calls themselves. Experts in peer-to-peer lending, their platform hosts more than 40,000 investors with total earnings of around 162 million GBP and lendings reaching 1.3 billion GBP at the time of writing.

Driven by a mission based on fair trade for all, personalized services, and building a better tomorrow for our society, Assetz Capital believes in a more just world for lenders and borrowers.

Assetz Capital is a platform with a wide range of accounts—depending on what your needs are. It’s aimed at investors, lenders, and intermediaries. Their loan products are mainly commercial mortgages and buy-to-let loans for landlords.

They’re also invested in bridging finance and residential refurbishment loans. Everything they do is presented in a clear way that makes it easy to understand all the risks.

Let’s take a quick look at Assetz Capital’s partners and clients. Working with British Business Investment and Defaqto, who gave them a 5-star review, is quite impressive. Plus, their Trustpilot rating is 4.2—which is also nothing to sneeze at.

As a final note, Assetz Capital Borrower is a nominee in the Scottish Mortgage Awards 2021 in the Specialist Lender of the Year category!