RateSetter – One Year Old today
RateSetter outside the Bank of England
RateSetter today celebrates our first full year in business. One year ago today, we launched RateSetter on an unsuspecting world, with the vision of creating great value Savings and Loans products between creditworthy Borrowers and smart Savers.
In that time, we have reached some terrific landmarks. We have matched just shy of £9m, across 2,400 loans, and 65,000 members. We regularly match more than £1m a month, and have helped create over £165,000 in interest for our Savers. You can see lots more here, (click through each stat to see more information).
Our Provision Fund has steadily grown, aided by the prudent lending decisions of my co-founder Peter Behrens and his credit team. Peter is a cautious man and I think that is a quality that RateSetter Savers will admire.
In our first year we believe we have proven our unique model works: in the past year, every single RateSetter lender has received every single penny of capital and interest that they expected. We have done the same job you would expect of a bank, with substantially better returns.
We have also worked with our “peer-to-peer” peers to establish an Association that delivers great clarity on the standards we feel are important and is a very positive step forward for the industry.
We owe a massive debt of gratitude to our Savers, who have backed a small company with a big idea, and without whom we would have never got the business moving forward. The best way we can repay that faith is to continue to cautiously bring lending opportunities to our market, and to grow our business in a sensible and measured way.
As we end our first year, we are very much looking to the future. We will look to improve our communications, website, operations and products. But we will also continue to keep our goals focused and simple – we are here to create the best value savings and loans products for our members.
Thank you for your support of RateSetter in its first year and as always please continue to let us know your thoughts.
Happy Birthday – keep up the good work! Hope the hangovers have worn off!
I am sure you will be even more successful over the next year.
I’m pleased to see you decided not to dilute the provision fund by distributing any potential surplus too early