Institutions Moving in With Platforms Old and New
By AltFi on Wednesday 12 November 2014
One of Europe's few dedicated peer-to-peer lending funds has signed an agreement to invest through a fairly unseasoned UK outfit.
Ablrate – a specialist provider of asset-backed leasing deals – is to become the beneficiary of institutional capital from Synthesis Multi-Asset Architecture (SICAV-SIF). SICAV-SIF has been buying up whole loans through its Sub-Fund: Synthesis-P2P. It holds over 90,000 of the loans originated by Lending Club and Prosper. And now Synthesis has committed itself to investing $20m through the nascent Ablrate platform over the coming year, kicking things off with a $2.150m investment.
David Bradley-Ward, Ablrate CEO and Co-Founder, commented on the investment:
"We are thrilled to welcome Synthesis as an investor and believe this commitment from them validates the aircraft financing model that we are pioneering. The Synthesis team has shown that it is very forward thinking in the P2P marketplace by creating the first European fund to invest through platforms, and now Synthesis is the first such fund to recognise the benefits of investing in the aircraft leasing marketplace alongside our existing investors."
Synthesis has achieved exposure to a diverse range of alternative finance asset classes besides consumer loans, upon which its initial investments were focused. Those asset classes include commodity trade finance, invoice funding and leases on fixed assets. Ablrate is a provider of the latter-most product.
Spyros Papadopoulos, Founder and CEO of Synthesis, explained the process:
"We have been speaking with Ablrate for some time, evaluating the proposition, the model and the technology. Our investment philosophy is to look beyond just the platform and evaluate the people behind the business. We have been very impressed with the professionalism of the team, their depth of knowledge of their industry, as well as that of peer/marketplace lending industry, and we are excited to be working with Ablrate."
The truly intriguing story here lies in the ability of Ablrate to attract so voluminous an institutional commitment in spite of being no more than a few months old. And Ablrate isn't the first relatively early-stage platform to secure an investment of this scale. New Zealand's first fully regulated peer-to-peer lending platform, Harmoney, recently secured a $50m investment from Blue Elephant Capital Management. Harmoney also launched within the past few months – but as the first mover in the Kiwi market the growth potential is enormous. As the first platform to attempt peer-to-peer asset-backed leasing, Ablrate possesses a similarly tantalizing upside – as corroborated by Synthesis' investment.
David Bradley-Ward
Ablrate
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