The New Year starts with a bang as we pick up Best Innovative Finance Provider in the Moneynet Awards and Best Alternative Lender 2017 from Trade Finance Global.

The prospect of Crowdstacker sticking to its New Year’s Resolution to have a dry January seem pretty dim this week with not one but two award successes which need to be celebrated.

We have once again been selected by the MoneyNet Awards to win ‘Best Innovative Finance Provider of the year’.  

Whilst debt finance specialists, Trade Finance Global, has named us Best Alternative Lender 2017.

Burning Night Group's new entertainment complex in Birmingham draws in the crowd.

The successful raise on Crowdstacker has so far seen over £2m lent to the expanding concept bar owner and operator.

Burning Night Group has already begun to deploy some of the money lent to it through the loan on the Crowdstacker P2P platform.  Most notably with the launch of its newest entertainment complex in Birmingham’s City Centre.

Mr Hammond delivered his inaugural (and also now his last following the announcement that Britain will have only one Budget per year from now on) autumn statement, or mini-budget, on Wednesday 23rd November.  

And he did so with the eyes of the media and Westminster firmly focused on whether he would continue down the road laid out by his predecessor, George Osborne.  Or if he would in fact be introducing new ideas to see the UK through the continuing economic uncertainty.

Crowdstacker takes on bigger brands and wins. 

In what has proven to be an award-winning year for Crowdstacker, it was announced yesterday that it has been voted Best Peer to Peer Lending Platform in 2016 by readers of Shares Magazine. (1)

The award win is something of a coup for Crowdstacker, which saw off competition from some of the biggest names in peer to peer lending, including Ratesetter and Funding Circle.

In the autumn of 2015 Crowdstacker launched what would become our most successful P2P lending campaign to date.  And now, as 2016 draws to a close, we are pleased to announce the campaign will be extending into early 2017.

Six months since the launch of the Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA), Karteek Patel, CEO of Crowdstacker takes a look at how it is creating a wave of new P2P investors, and a significant number are also moving money from other types of ISA.

In the six months since the new IFISA launched an examination of our data clearly shows it is attracting large numbers of new investors to the interest rates offered by Crowdstacker.  Plus it also means the IFISA is potentially opening up access to billions of pounds of financing for UK SMEs.

This month it was announced that Dutch bank ING is to cut 5000 jobs in a branch cull as part of a “Think Forward” strategy, replacing real staff with automated digital technology.*

But where does this leave customers? What happens when you have a question or want to complain about something? Is the future purely robo-advisors and online chats? 

And, crucially, is this really what customers actually want? I am not completely convinced.  

Vote for Crowdstacker in the Moneyfacts Consumer Awards 2017

Leading city centre bar chain, BurningNight Group, has already secured over £900k in the first month on the Crowdstacker Peer to Peer lending platform.

BurningNight is offering 7% p.a. interest to those participating in the overall £3.5m raise, to expand its successful chain of bar brands which already operate in some of the country’s busiest city centres including Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Cardiff.

By Andrew Hagger, Personal Finance Commentator

With interest rates on traditional cash based savings accounts steadily heading towards zero it’s not surprising that more of us are looking for alternative ways to earn a healthier return on our nest egg.

But how do you know where to put your money and when not to make a hasty decision that you may later regret?