the Financial Times. IAG, which was already a minority investor in Zopa, is expected to take majority control of the startup following the investment.The funding, which takes Zopa's total raise to over $460 million, has come at a cost for the company's valuation and its existing investors, though.
The startup has been somewhat successful in this effort: It received a conditional banking license in 2018, making it the first UK P2P lender to do so. However, as part of the license, it was required to raise extra capital to alleviate regulators' fears it wouldn't be stable enough to operate as a full bank. The new raise represents a last-minute lifeline for the fintech's banking ambitions because it came on the same day Zopa's restricted banking license expired.
While ultimately the news is good for Zopa, the last-gasp nature of its raise is evidence of the growing challenge for the UK's P2P space. Augmentum says that Zopa's raise was "challenging due to the nature of the investor pool the company was targeting" — that pool being the P2P space, cited by the FT.
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