Company: Fund Ourselves
Founder: Nadeem Siam and Tuomas Hietanen
Website: fundourselves.com
The Business: Challenging high-cost lending, Fund Ourselves is a new and innovative peer-to-peer lender, offering affordable loans to borrowers and returns of up to 15% per annum for investors.
About Fund Ourselves
Fund Ourselves was founded in 2017 by Nadeem Siam, a former space engineer with NASA, now turned-entrepreneur looking to solve the UK’s issue with debt and high cost lending.
“We set up to solve the Wonga problem,” Siam explains. “Millions of people in the UK use high-cost credit every year, but many are caught in a cycle of revolving credit and debt that they cannot get out of.”
With some of the UK’s largest lenders falling out of the market in the last year, including Wonga, QuickQuid and The Money Shop, the need for a strong and more responsible alternative is evident.
“Fund Ourselves is strong and viable alternative. Many high cost lenders have left the market, but demand for short term credit is not going away.”
With Fund Ourselves, customers can borrow up to £500 over 3 months, with no early repayment fees but importantly, those facing financial difficulty will be offered an extension of up to 12 months, completely interest-free.
For investors, they can earn between 5% and 15% per annum by investing in borrowers applying for unsecured loans on their platform. Fund Ourselves use their own diversification software to spread your investment across multiple borrowers – and whilst not covered by FSCS there is a provision fund in place to minimise any losses for investors.
With over 20 staff, this Fintech is slowly emerging as one of the disruptors in this highly controversial space and currently has a head office in Waterloo and an operators team in Surrey.
