RateSetter to offer secured loans

Peer-to-peer lender RateSetter will expand its product range to include secured personal loans, following approval from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

RateSetter has written A$3.5 million of unsecured personal loans for 3644 borrowers since it started in Australia last November. It offers loans from $2000 to $35,000 with terms from six months to five years.

It has the distinction of being the only P2P lender in the local market admitting retail investor/lenders onto its platform. The others are still going through approvals or are using alternative funding structures, such as pooled funds.

All RateSetter Australia's funding is retail money.

It also has the distinction of being the first Australian lender to implement comprehensive credit reporting data sharing. RateSetter is supplying comprehensive data to Veda.

At this stage it is not able to access any other credit provider's comprehensive data (because there isn't any to access) but RateSetter Australia chief executive Daniel Foggo said he expected to see at least one other lender filing comprehensive data within the next few months, if not weeks.

RateSetter has received $120 million of applications over the past six months. Foggo said the fact that it had underwritten only $3.5 million was an indication of its standards.

Critics have characterised P2P lending platforms as suspect automated systems that might not stand up during a financial crisis or economic downturn.

"We are not automated. We have a sophisticated technical platform but we do a lot of underwriting - probably more than traditional lenders," Foggo said.

Loan pricing is done on a "last match rates" basis, which means that lenders post the price at which they are prepared to lend and borrowers post the rate they are looking for, and when there is a match the transaction proceeds.

The RateSetter website lists indicative rates of 4.2 per cent for a one-year term, 6.6 per cent for three years and ten per cent for five years.

RateSetter charges borrowers an underwriting fee and takes ten per cent of the lender's interest payments.