PROFILE
take out London then it’s stagnant or going down. The average company in Scotland or Manchester doesn’t have access to the funds to invest and it’s not growing.” Offering between £1m and £10m to firms who are looking to invest in growth but struggle to find a lender, ThinCats’ average loan size of just under £300,000 sets it apart from many other P2P lenders whose modus operandi is automating large numbers of smaller loans. Consequently Mould sees his role less as competing with the likes of Funding Circle, and more as plugging
the gap for mid-sized structured finance loans that banks can’t – or won’t – service themselves. “We focus on what we call the deserving underserved companies,” he explains. “They tend to have rising sales and staff numbers but no assets, so banks won’t lend to them. I am not doing a single loan that the banks are doing. To quote one of my loan originators – who used to work for Santander – ‘I haven’t been able to lend any money for the last five years, finally I can sit here and actually start lending’.” Persuading institutional
investors like pension funds that there is more to life than stocks, shares and bonds is a slow process but will be well worth the effort, according to Mould. “This model works but you can’t do it on retail investors alone,” he says. In October ThinCats scored a major victory, landing £200m of funding including £70m plus from US asset-backedsecurities outfit Waterfall Asset Management. No doubt it helps open doors that ThinCats’ owner, ESF, is itself majority owned by a British pension fund. “[The big institutions]
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have been thinking about how to do this, but they haven’t had the tools,” he asserts. “I walk in and they say ‘Ah, that’s the tool’. My prediction is that eventually between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of all lending in the UK will be non-bank lending, just like it is in the US.” So does that mean that ThinCats is not really a P2P lender? Its focus on institutional investors and use of intermediaries have prompted some to ask this question, but Mould says that both the platform which lies at the heart of the business, as well as its core of loyal ‘expert’ retail investors,