Landbay lends money to people in the market for buy-to-let mortgages, using a peer-to-peer model. Launched in the UK in 2014 by John Goodall and Gray Stern, it has lent around £40m to date on over 220 mortgages.

It makes money by charging borrowers a fee when they take out funds and when interest is paid. It does not charge lenders.

Landbay raised £1.6m in investment via crowdfunding site Seedrs, and another £2m from institutional investors – a hedge fund and an asset manager.

It is targeting people looking to borrow up to £500,000 with fixed-rate terms of three to five years.

Chief commercial officer Stern says the future will be about partnerships between old and new finance. Traditional lenders will take “the role as a utility, with marketing, originating, underwriting [and] service left to the lower-cost and largely digital upstarts”, he told FinTech Profile earlier this year.