Our report, Show me the Money[link to website] provides the most comprehensive snapshot to date of the UK peer-to-peer lending (P2P) market. Using data from the three biggest P2P platforms in the UK (Zopa, RateSetter and Funding Circle) we highlight the regional geography of lending in the UK. This is thefirst time anyone has published financial data with an open data certificate.
You can download the report as a PDF-document here.
Regions in the South lendmore but the UK is surprisingly balanced when it comes to recipients
Key differences in UK regional activity from the report include:
Some quick stats from the report:
Time period | From October 2010 to May 2013 |
Number of lenders | 48,891 |
Number of recipients | 59,851 |
Number of loan parts | ~ 14 million* |
Total amount | £378 million |
The unit of analysis is a loan part. A recipient who takes out a loan of, for example,£5,000 may receive the money from hundreds of different lenders. Vice versa, a lender may subdivide her investment into many loans. A typical (median) amount for a loan part is £10. However, in a small number of cases the investment per loan part is substantially larger.
An interactive visualisation with the consumer in mind
One reason for opening up this data is to build consumers’ trust by being transparent. We also wanted to give individuals a way of exploring this vast data set. The visualisation allows you to drill into a specific region of the UK and compare it to the rest of the country. As the data derives from individuals, it is of course personal data. However, we went to great length, including carrying out a small-scaleprivacy impact assessment,to protect people’s privacy.
Growth in the market is expected to continue
P2P lending has been growing rapidly over the last few years. The visualisations below show how more and more people joined the market either as lenders or recipients. Each dot represents an individual.
Towards a real-time map of the financial market
A broader lesson from this project is that publishing this sort of granular financial data is possible. We demonstrate here how to publish open data and how to make it accessible. In sum this project is a step toward a more publicly transparent and comprehensive mapping of the financial system. Eventually we hope this map will become updated in real-time with data feeds directly sourced from P2P platforms and other financial markets.
Go on and have a play -show yourself the money!