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Cormac Leech is co-founder of Liberum Alternative Finance who are a (the?) specialist strategic adviser and development partner to the UK Alternative Finance sector, focusing on online direct and marketplace lending and equity crowdfunding.

Liberum have done some $2bn of the largest P2P investment fund originations in the UK – notably P2PGI now a listed FTSE250 company. Which to make that explicit means that one of the biggest 250 listed companies in the UK purely invests in P2P. An interesting stat in itself when you hear how Fintech ain’t much from the odd naysayer.

Cormac is perhaps London’s best known and deepest thinker on Alternative Finance. In LFP038 Peter Renton and I discussed the highlights of Lendit 2015 – Europe’s largest P2P conference last year. We both picked out Cormac’s coruscating presentation – a little like the scene in Apocalypse now where they are on LSD under the bridge while the battle is going on. More prosaically it fitted a 3hr presentation into about 20 minutes and included everything about P2P including advice to the Bank of England as to how they should in the future use P2P assets to control the money supply.

Plenty has been happening in all directions with P2P lending and I thought it would be a great time to hear from someone who, although having an indirect stake in the success of the industry, is not the CEO of one and therefore that much more dispassionate.  Furthermore as always I aim to dive beneath all the froth and trivia and get to the deeper waters.

Plenty in this show including: Continue reading →