LendInvest has opened up its site to a wider investor audience by reducing its minimum investment size.

Since launching, LendInvest has required a minimum investment on the platform of £50,000. This has now been reduced to £10,000.

Recent research by the Open Data Institute (ODI) and supported by the Bank of England, confirms that the UK’s peer-to-peer lending market is growing rapidly, having trebled in size in the last three years. According to the ODI research, the market is set to grow to over £1 billion by 2016.

David Serafini, LendInvest managing director, said: “The recent ODI report shows that there is a huge amount of interest in this asset class. There were also a number of really interesting items to come out of the report. One of these was that in over 14 million loan parts that have traded, only a very small handful of these were for large amounts of money (over £50,000). So whilst the P2P space is growing rapidly and moving into the mainstream, crowdfunding has a way to go for it to become a mainstream investment for High Net Worth and Sophisticated Investors.

“LendInvest provides investors with the opportunity of lending into the huge funding gap in the residential and commercial mortgage market. LendInvest is a P2P lender, but provides investors with the significant additional benefit of an investment that is secured against property.”

LendInvest Co-Founder, Christian Faes, added: “Since LendInvest launched, we have completed almost £5 million of transactions over numerous deals. The real advantage with LendInvest is that investors can start earning a return on their investment straight away – investors don’t have to wait around for months on end, to see if enough investors sign up to do a deal. We have live deals that are funded and there for investors to take loan parts in.”