In Buckinghamshire in 2004, a small team who had once helped build Britain's first internet bank decided that the next idea was to leave out the bank.
They had met at Egg, the online bank that launched in 1998 and showed that British customers would trust a website with their money. The five who would become Zopa's founders, Richard Duvall, James Alexander, Giles Andrews, David Nicholson and Tim Parlett, had seen the inside of that machine. They had also seen eBay take off. If strangers could trade a teapot online, why couldn't they lend each other money?
But what almost nobody outside fintech noticed was that the lender who had made peer-to-peer famous was already planning to leave it.
The company needed money first. Early in 2004 it had to raise funds, and Giles Andrews is said to have had experience raising angel finance. The plan sounded, to many, like a hobby for people who had read too much about the internet. Lenders pick borrowers, banks take a cut and pay savers less, the founders argued. Zopa would simply arrange the match.
It launched in March 2005. For years it grew quietly. Through the 2008 financial crisis its investors suffered only a slight dip in returns, a record the founders could point to when banks were collapsing. In January 2017 it became the first British P2P lender to pass £2bn in loans, and in May that year it became fully FCA regulated.
But what almost nobody outside fintech noticed was that the lender who had made peer-to-peer famous was already planning to leave it. In November 2016 Zopa announced it wanted a banking licence. It got interim licences in December 2018 and a full one in June 2020. In December 2021 it closed the P2P business entirely and bought back investors' loans.
The price was the dream that started it. A company founded to bypass banks had become one.
The money followed. SoftBank and others put in $300m in October 2021 at about a $1bn valuation. A 2022 IPO plan never happened. In December 2024 Zopa raised $87m privately instead, citing a sluggish tech IPO market. Revenue reached £303.4m in 2024, with net income of £34.2m.
For a founder, the story is not that the first idea was wrong. It is that Zopa was willing to treat its own founding idea as a stepping stone, and keep the team, the brand and the customers when it changed.