An update on our partnership with George Banco

Last month, we announced that we planned to enter into a new arrangement with George Banco, a guarantor loans provider. Under this arrangement, RateSetter investors would lend directly to George Banco borrowers - as opposed to the previous arrangement where RateSetter investors lent to George Banco itself, who then lent money onwards to their borrowers. This change was part of restructuring of what we called ‘wholesale’ lending.

We have subsequently decided not to go ahead with this new arrangement with George Banco. After further examination of the infrastructure required to do this, we concluded there were better uses of our development resources which may be deployed more effectively to source other borrowers.

Therefore, we will not facilitate lending directly to George Banco’s customers, and accordingly we have updated our Principles of Lending document which sets out our lending criteria (this can be viewed here). The existing wholesale loans to George Banco will continue to be repaid in accordance with the schedule of the existing loan contracts. The total of these existing loans currently stands at £31.5 million.