FundingSecure Opiniones 174

I invested with this company thinking they would look after my money
How wrong I was

Whoever is doing their valuations they seem to be getting them woefully wrong so that when your investment defaults you are lucky to get 30% of your initial capital, if I did my job so poorly I would be sacked

When they do default there seems to be no interest from Funding Secure in getting your money back, they just post update after update sometimes for years

I have used a number of P2P companies over the years (Kuflink, Relendex Etc) and this company is by far the worst I have dealt with
The very last loan I have with them should have ended 9/12/2017 and has still not paid out, think I have seen the last of that

Take a look at all the negative reviews for this company - I know angry people are prone to exaggeration but my experience has led me to believe every one 100%

This business stated off well several years ago and it was possible to invest with some confidence. Over the past 2 years it has declined greatly with more and more loans defaulting and the returns from them giving loss of capital. This seems to be due to over /poor valuation of assets and insufficient scrutiny of guarantees.

I found the platform easy to use and staff very informative. I understand all investments can’t be a winner but it's a lot safer than risky shares. I've made a good income on development projects and watches which are a real passion of mine! Funding Secure’s customer service and updates have improved a great deal, much better than other companies I've used.

FundingSecure offer unusually high rates of return. But the downside is that their loans often don't get paid back till well beyond the official "due date." For me, this is no big problem, since each loan is backed by strong security, and the interest keeps accruing. But if you are not used to this sort of arrangement, it can be disconcerting.

I have always found their staff to be really helpful and open.

About three years ago, when I started investing on the platform, returns were good. Right now struggling to get my money back, as most of it is blocked in unredeemed loans that seem to take forever to settle. Invest with caution.

I have been using Funding Secure for a little over a year now and have a little over £10k in the platform. Before I get onto the bad stuff, there are a number of positives on the platform.

1) It is generally a user-friendly website and the ability to export your loanbook to Excel is a handy feature.

2) The secondary market is also good and there are plenty of opportunities to exit loans early or acquire loans that you missed out on (usually at a premium). Please be aware that the tax implications for purchasing loans on the secondary market are complicated so unless buying/selling within a IFISA, I would recommend doing some research.

3) There are still a number of good new loan offerings (though these are becoming rarer). These are typically pawn style loans e.g. Rolex watches/gold/cars or the occasional property loan with a low LTV.

4) Customer service - I have always got through to someone on the online chat feature and they have always been polite, courteous and taken my concerns on board sincerely. However, in many instances I am after an update for a loan and I get a fairly uninspiring response along the lines of 'the manager responsible for that loan is away this week' or 'the loan is currently being investigated and we will post an update shortly'.

5) There seems to be a bit of a drive from management for the platform to not go the same way as Lendy which is a positive. More regular updates are being posted for a number of loans which are overdue and there seems to be a greater focus on recoveries of existing loans as opposed to issuing new loans. Whether this actually results in more recoveries, we will have to see.

Now we get onto the bad. I will admit that after a pretty positive experience for the first six months, I became a little carried away and invested too much (>£10k) into the platform in an IFISA.

1) Overdue loans - the statistics on the website are incredibly misleading as a loan is required to be officially defaulted by the platform in order to be counted as 'defaulted' i.e. it is not an automatic process once the loan is overdue. Unfortunately, what this means is that you will find you quickly have a loan book which becomes more and more overdue but not formally defaulted. In a number of cases, these six month loans are 2-3 years overdue but not defaulted and as such do not form part of the capital loss statistics for lenders even though the chance of any substantial recovery at that stage is effectively zero. You also need to consider the opportunity cost of this effect. £100 locked away in a loan for 3 years with no potential recovery is £100 that could have been invested elsewhere so that's 3 years of other returns foregone. Of my current loans, 85/163 are overdue though a number of these are loans with multiple loan parts. Of individual loans, I would estimate that at least 30% of my loan portfolio is overdue which is not at all reassuring.

This issue is compounded by the fact that I don't believe (other than platform reputation) that there is much of an incentive for Funding Secure to pursue many of these overdue loans. It is a difficult and lengthy process, and 6 months is usually not long enough for any bridging loan so demanding interest from the borrower at that period seems to often run into problems.

Finally, on this point, in many instances I have loans which become overdue and don't receive a single update for many months. I contacted Funding Secure at one point as I had over a dozen loans which were overdue by 3-6 months with not a single update.

2) Interest rates are not high enough to warrant the risk. An interest rate of 12/13% might seem incredibly tempting but if you take an example of a loan of £100 @ 12% for the standard 6 month period, you stand to earn £6 of interest on a £100 stake. If that loan defaults you may get some, all or none of your money back. Part of the big problem here is the loan structure whereby capital and interest are only paid at the end of the loan term meaning that all of the risk comes down to the final day of payment. Other P2P platforms stagger payments of capital and interest monthly, thus spreading the risk over multiple periods.

3) 60/70% LTV does not provide enough of a safety margin to cover for a distressed sale. If I take a recent example of a Malaya Garnet (large precious stone) I had a healthy three figure sum invested in, the valuation of the stone was £88200-£102900. Funding Secure, as they usually do, went for a more conservative valuation based on this of £90000 and lent £60000 against the stone (LTV = £60000/£90000 = 66.67%). Unfortunately, the loan defaulted and in a distressed sale, the stone only fetched £10597.90, resulting in no interest paid to investors and a capital loss of 82.3%. This is for an item which I would believe is considerably more fungible and easier to offload than many of the property offerings and really highlights the risks associated with P2P.

4) Assets which are valued are not revalued after multiple renewals (often several years) which does not allow for changes to market conditions which would drastically alter the LTV on offer. The initial value is taken as gospel 2-3 years down the line when the LTV may have gone from 70% to 90%, meaning that investors are not appropriately informed of the increased risk a loan may now carry (which it did not previously).

In all, Funding Secure does offer a number of good loans which redeem on time and earn investors money. However, in my view, no amount of due diligence can prevent you from investing in some truly rotten loans and the interest rate + interest/capital repayment model is not sufficient to cover this level of risk. One or two bad loans can quite easily wipe all of the interest you have earned in a year and for these reasons I am looking to wind down my position over the coming months. For the seasoned P2P investor I think there are still some opportunities on Funding Secure which can prove profitable if you take a very long run view (i.e. 2 year loan view as opposed to 6 months) but I would need to see some serious changes to the recovery process if I were to consider investing further.

I've been holding off posting this review for some time because I had a lot of faith that FS had everything under control and everything would turn out alright, but it's just been dragging on far too long now. I have over £1600 still invested in 10 different loans, with nothing I can do to retrieve any of them. I also have around £350 in interest owed to me which I doubt I will get. I've been an investor for two years, the first year was very good, I regularly invested more as I was so pleased with the service and enjoyed keeping up to date with how the loans were progressing. However, like a lot of other P2P, they have gone tremendously downhill in the last 12 months. All my ‘active’ and defaulted investments are now massively overdue with the oldest dating back to an expected end date of August 2017. One loan, that was supposed to end in March 2018, has had a number of updates for lenders each promising that the loan will complete within the next 4-6 weeks, it’s been nearly 52 weeks now and has barely progressed.

My faith and confidence is finally up and I am now certain that I will only ever use this business again as a means to remind myself and others why you shouldn’t invest in P2P lending. The only reason I’m not giving 1 star is that I also invested in Lendy around the same time and my experience with them is far worse.

Look at the art loans - £2.3 million leant towards art work that was not secured. I had to visit the court hearing to find out the truth as customer services kept fobbing me off; you'll see no mention of this in the loan updates.

Currently on the site is a purported first charge loan (3271140798) on a £8.7m facility for a property in London. However read the small print and you'll see due to the presence of a Deed of Subordination this is in fact a de facto second charge loan - the de facto first charge is for an amount greater than the value of the property. So in the event of a default recovery would be Nil.

Really should be called Funding inSecure

Take a look on the P2P independent forum web page under ART FOR ARTS SAKE to see the level of bad feeling. I used to invest in this site or perhaps I should say I used to throw money away on this site. My potential loss is around £550 on the arts loans but one investor seems to have £100,000 in it. Stopped putting money in ages ago but still around £6000 in loans that may never pay back.

No Improvement At All
I posted the below review back in February then June 2018
Unfortunately nothing has changed, they go from bad to worse
Many many loans are way overdue & they still post ludicrous updates
I would very strongly advise checking P2P Independent Forum before parting with a single penny

If there was a -10 Star Rating that is what they would receive

""Terrible Communications
As stated previously Power Boat Loans are a shambles, still a shambles!!!
Countless unredeemed or defaulted loan
Appear to make no effort to chase up borrowers
Have had one loan where security was valued at £1,566,000.00, sold at auction for £304,570.98 , yes true, well over ! million GBP short of the valuation!!!
I could name a lot more
Please, please do not invest without checking out p2p independent forum.com""

I have been lending for just over a year and have been very disappointed by the company. The idea is good the execution terrible. At one point I had £20000 with them, but started to realise they just didn't enforce the terms of the loans and the valuations for the security were unreliable at best. As for the updates, I mean excuses there is no point saying anything really. I sadly still have £8000 with them all over due of course and steadily drifting into default or unredeemed status.

One of my overdue loans has passed 1000 days, and 2 more are catching up.

All their updates to date can be summarised as:
1. The borrower is seeking refinance
2. Contracts are in place. Confirmations received. Funds expected shortly
3. Funds did not come in. Borrower is looking for a new lender.

At one time there was even outlandish claims that funds to repay the loan would come from Switzerland and although a firm date of repayment was confirmed at the time, the funds somehow got stuck and has never been heard from again. Subsequent to that, funds were to be received from Dubai and confirmed to be in possession by the lawyer but that lender disappeared into oblivion too. Now it's another scenario of stalled talks.

These are exactly the same tactics of your typical email spam folder scammers at work: take everyone for a ride by making false promises and keep up the cycle indefinitely by coming up with one new promise after another.

Lendy is having all the bad press but with this kind of recovery procedures these Funding 'secure' employ, these guys are the worst.

Funding secure's the name , oh what irony!
I lent on an assest that they said would never exceed 70% ltv.
Guess what , the borrower never paid , and the asset was sold and ive now recieved 2.48% of my money back. Thats not a typo! And not a penny of interest ever paid.
They claim they will chase the borrower in the courts, anyone with experience of FS knows we will never see another penny. Incompetance from start to finish.

So if you fancy losing 97.52% of your money and recieving no interest, and it dragging on for years, why dont you lend with FS in quality 'secured loans' like this and many many other shockers.
They are the cowboys of p2p and by far the worst platform ive used.

Personally, I seriously doubt some of these 5star are genuine, noone who has been with them for a year plus, could think they are a 5 star outfit .

Stay well away!

Close competition with Lendy as to which Company is the worst of all the P2P lenders.This is the 3rd Tax Year I have been an investor with them - my numbers are abysmal! Couple that with the very poor information regarding overdue loans and I for one can't see them being in business a year from now!

An example of their over valuations is a Garnet valued at £90000 and sold after the borrower defaulted for £10,591.47. No proper answer why.
Their valuations can not be trusted.

Invested over £5000 with this company. After waiting several months after the "end of loan date" specified on their table. I contacted the company wanting an explination of why they wernt chasing these final payments up for me. I have just received 11 emails (31.12.18) informing me that all 11 have defaulted, resulting in me loosing my investments. What a company. I would never recommend this organisation for investments to anyone
.

Lent a lot of money on art loans which it turns out were not in the security of FS AS THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN.

A couple of hundred secured loans to choose from many with rates over 20% together with a default rate of below half a percent make this peer to peer platform stand out from the crowd. FCA authorised and availability of an ISA add to the attraction.

Several loans in default (the oldest I have was expected to end 16 months ago...), scarce updates and when there are updates are mainly lies (the borrower will pay within two weeks and then same message after two weeks), inexistent recovery process.
Furthermore, FundingSecure shockingly don't always lock the assets the borrower takes the loan against, see the case of Mr Green that sold the paintings before paying back the loans.
I have only lost a few hundred pounds because of them but I am sure other users haven't been this "lucky". Their incompetence goes well beyond the risks of P2P lending. Stay away.

After lending now for over 9 months it is very clear that they are misleading investors on a '6 month investment'. Out of 40 investments that are due to have been paid back with interest, 85% have not been??!! Updates are very poor and they are not making attempts to sell any 'asset back securities' at auction etc to get back money for investors.

So far I've lost a lot of money and don't see getting money back likely so I wouldn't suggest anyone to lend on this site. They are taking on way too many loans and making their turn out of it to care about the lenders.... Avoid!