You do not pick borrowers and cannot see who they are. The platform underwrites centrally using its own credit scorecard, built from its lending history, then matches pooled lender offers against approved applications. Borrower rates are set by risk. A borrower may hold only one loan at a time, which is a genuine control against stacking debt. What is not published is the credit policy, the scorecard inputs, the cut-off score or the acceptance rate, and there are no risk grades — every loan is simply labelled high risk and non-prime. The real audit of the process is the Ombudsman's 57% uphold rate on borrower complaints, which found the affordability checks wanting in specific cases.

The platform names four executives: George Huntley as chief executive, Mike Carter as executive chairman, Kevin Allen as chief compliance officer and Chris Myers as chief technology officer. Having a named compliance chief in a four-person team is notable for this kind of lending. The company register lists six officers, including Charles Balcombe, Oliver Linde and Joshua Graham, who do not appear on the public team page and are likely investor-appointed directors; Graham was previously listed as chief executive, so there has been a handover. The firm employed 15 people at 31 January 2025 and completed the FCA's Project Innovate incubator before launching, which is a meaningful credential in this market.

The platform services and collects every loan; you never deal with the borrower. The most important thing to understand is forbearance: where a borrower is in difficulty the platform freezes interest at 0%, so your income on that loan stops while the money stays out. That is correct treatment under UK rules and it is exactly why the managed-delinquency bucket is so large — 16.8% of the most recent year's loans — and why your return is so far below the borrower's rate. Recoveries are real but modest: older years have been restated down by two to three percentage points as money came in. Debt collection fees rank ahead of both the platform's fee and your capital.

The headline cost is that you receive 50% of the interest the borrower pays and the platform keeps the other 50% as its administration fee. It appears only in the terms of service; the FAQ describes it merely as a fee proportional to the interest you receive. It is at least a success fee — nothing is charged on a loan that pays nothing — and it is shown per loan when you make an offer. There are no deposit, withdrawal, account or exit fees. Debt collection fees are taken from recoveries ahead of your capital. Cash sitting in the queue earns nothing, and with no ISA available the whole return is taxed as income.

The serious negative record is at the Financial Ombudsman. Gracombex Ltd has been the subject of 28 final decisions, of which 16 were upheld — a 57% rate — the earliest from 2017, and every single one was brought by a borrower rather than a lender. Two patterns run through them: unaffordable lending through repeat borrowing, and errors on borrowers' credit files. In one decision the ombudsman found that by the fourth of six loans a borrower had been borrowing continuously for nine months with almost no financial buffer, and ordered interest and charges refunded with 8% interest. In another, decided in late 2025, the firm was ordered to correct a credit file and pay GBP 250 compensation. Context matters: a specialist reviewer found the firm had fewer complaints than four competitors in the same market. No FCA enforcement action was found. Its 4.4 Trustpilot score from 485 reviews reflects borrowers, not lenders.

No. The terms forbid transferring a loan, the investor page says there is no resale market, and the FAQ states loans cannot be turned into cash before they are repaid. The mitigation is that loans are short.

This is unsecured, very high-cost consumer credit, so a 13% return here is not comparable with 13% on a property loan secured against a building — there is no collateral, no safety fund and no buyback. And the platform's own headline counters contradict each other, quoting 150,000, 125,000 and 100,000 loans on two pages with no dates on any of them. Third-party directory data on this platform is also unreliable, wrongly claiming it has a resale market and a buyback guarantee. Neither exists.