The next six months will be make or break for peer-to-peer lending and investing in Australia says analytics company GlobalData.One of the more enduring results of the global financial crisis in 2008 was the rise of P2P investing and lending, also known as marketplace lending. However, it has never taken off in Australia the way it did in other markets like the UK or the US.Andrew Haslip, financial services analyst at GlobalData, said: "The P2P finance platforms used the balance sheet weakness of the incumbent banks, the unrelenting negative headlines of the crisis that undermined the brands of traditional finance, and the rock-bottom interest rates used to shore up the economy to fuel an expansion that gave some of them the volume to be sustainable."It is no coincidence that the hardest hit economies in the actual financial crisis - the UK and the US - saw the largest rises in P2P lending."Other Western economies such as Australia and New Zealand never quite witnessed the same conditions as the key ingredients of severe brand damage and ultra-low deposit rates never appeared.Lending did dip but quickly recovered, as Aussie and Kiwi banks suffered little of the carnage seen in Europe or the US. As such, investors could still earn a decent return from safe term deposits, and borrowers could access the finance they wanted from the traditional lenders. Only in key niches such as SME lending did P2P take off.For investors there is little competition from term deposits, with average deposit rates at 2.2 per cent in July 2018 (compared to 8.5 per cent in July 2008), and so there is more incentive to lend via platforms such as SocietyOne and RateSetter. For borrowers, the rates on offer at the P2P lenders are increasingly attractive relative to traditional banks.Haslip: "The market conditions are in place for P2P lenders and other new financial providers like neobanks [to rise]. And these conditions should persist until well after the banking commission's final report in February 2019, with the next six months crucial."