Loan comparison platforms are everywhere. But for people with irregular income, thin credit files or past defaults, many of them fall short. They offer teaser rates, vague explanations and little real help. LoanTube set out to change that.
Launched in 2019, LoanTube is a UK-based digital credit marketplace that connects underserved borrowers with FCA-regulated lenders, offering real-rate comparisons and transparent eligibility decisions in real time.
The company now processes 10,000 loan applications per day and was recently shortlisted for Fintech Scale-up of the Year at the 2025 Fintech Awards London.
Its mission has also attracted partnerships like the one with non-prime lender Evlo, embedding LoanTube’s technology into Evlo’s branch-based lending journey.
As the company prepares to launch a new credit enabler tool designed to help declined applicants qualify for loans, it’s doubling down on transparency, financial inclusion and customer trust.
In this week’s Behind the Idea, we speak to Aymeric Monod-Gayraud, co-founder of LoanTube, about solving for the credit marginalised and invisible, why the current system is ‘ broken’, and what it means to build a company where everyone just wants to ‘make shit happen’.
Tell us more about your company and its offering
We run a FCA-regulated loans marketplace. We’re not a lender, but we help connect consumers, especially non-prime ones, with a wide variety of FCA-regulated lenders. That includes people with thin credit files, defaults, irregular income, or no history in the UK at all.
When someone applies for a loan, say £2,000, our platform uses their application form data, credit file and open banking data to find live offers they’re eligible for. And crucially, we show real rates, not teaser rates. That was our starting point: we wanted to be the UK’s first real-rate comparison platform.
People come to us because they need a loan, not because they want a £15 a month credit-builder product. Our job is to maximise their chances of getting what they came for, from the best possible lender, on the best possible terms.
Unlike typical comparison platforms that primarily focus on re-directing traffic to other sites , we’re a fully-fledged broker. We do the hard work behind the scenes, processing your information, integrating with lenders and matching you with live, real-rate loan offers. While all of our closest comps focus predominantly on serving prime borrowers, we focus on the people they overlook: non-prime consumers.
What problem was your company set up to solve?
When we started out, we saw that most loan offers on online comparison sites were so-called teaser offers. You’d be told, ‘Hey, you can get a loan at five per cent’, when ultimately there was no chance. We wanted to bring transparency. If you’re eligible, show the real terms. And so we ended up launching one of the UK’s first real-rates comparison marketplaces.
Very quickly, our competitors replicated our approach, however we were able to carve out our niche in non-prime, and decided to dig into this massively underserved consumer segment. They are the very people who need the most help. And bear in mind, we don’t create the demand, we simply make sure that this segment isn’t turned away by legitimate lenders.
Since launch, how has your company evolved?
It took six months to broker our first loan. We launched in 2019, then got hit by Covid, and only really relaunched in 2021. We’ve built the business through sheer perseverance and determination.
Today we handle around 10,000 loan applications every day. Only about 20 per cent result in offers, not because we’re not trying, but because the lending landscape remains relatively conservative. And many of our customers have difficult credit histories.
We are of the view that if you’re un willing to lend to a customers, at least help them understand why, not just ‘computer says no’. It turns out that’s more complicated than it sounds.
The market is incredibly binary: you’re either accepted or declined. And if you’re declined, you’re rarely told the reason. But sometimes the reason is marginal, like someone spending £60 a month on gambling when the cutoff is £50.
And if you don’t use credit at all, the system doesn’t consider you a living, breathing adult. Which is, in itself, absurd. Thankfully, open banking is a great push for change. It gives us real visibility into people’s financial lives – how they earn, how they spend, how they manage day to day. It allows us to build a better picture and give people a fairer shot.
What has been the biggest challenge or most ‘tricky moment’ to overcome?
We’ve bootstrapped LoanTube with no external capital until now. We couldn’t afford to hire big teams or take wild bets. And that forced us to be very calculated about every decision we make. But it also gave us time to observe and learn. We had fewer distractions, less pressure to chase vanity metrics, and we could make sure we were solving the right problems.
It was initially a huge challenge, especially for a regulated business needing an FCA licence. But I wouldn’t change it. There were plenty of naysayers, people saying: “Why do this? Compare the Market already exists”. But the devil’s in the detail. No one else was doing what we were trying to do.
What are your biggest achievements or ‘proudest moment’ so far?
There’s no single moment. But two things come to mind. One is customer feedback: people telling us they wouldn’t have been able to cover a medical emergency without us. That’s incredibly humbling. The second is when talented people choose to work with us, even though we can’t match the salaries of bigger companies. They join us for the mission. That’s special.
For me and my co-founder Gurprit, it’s about leaving the world a little better than we originally found it. You can’t take your money to the grave, but you can have a positive impact on the lives of many.
How would you describe the culture of your company?
We’re a tight knit team: 10 developers in India and Brazil, and 12 of us in London. We run our business like a high-performance Formula 1 team: lean, focused and built for impact. We have built a culture shaped by optimism, grit and a shared mission to fix a broken lending system. Titles and hierarchy don’t matter here, execution does.
We don’t believe in micromanaging. Culture is about creating an environment where people are better than you, because you’ve helped them grow. That takes maturity, patience and a lot of humility. When someone makes a mistake, you don’t shout. You coach. The goal is to build a team where people feel safe enough to make mistakes, and confident enough to fix them.
What’s in store for the future?
We feel there has been limited innovation to serve market segments below prime in the last decade. While open banking has massively improved the loan underwriting process by making it genuinely personalised, the industry hasn’t actually improved outcomes for those that get declined.
Since the last year, we have been working on a devising a new tool/product that will actually coach/educate/influence declined customers so that they can get approved as soon as possible.
And it’s important to say: this isn’t about credit scores. You can have a good credit score and yet not get approved for a loan. That is because every lender applies its own weighting to the data that make up a credit score.
Moreover, one could argue that the whole system is flawed. You can pay off your debts, close your accounts, and still get declined – because there’s nothing left for lenders to assess.
We are of the view, that credit should empower borrowers to improve their livelihoods, and not entrap them. At LoanTube, we are moving past the score. In Q4 2025, we will be launching a world-first solution to this problem, and look forward to showing the tool to The Fintech Times as we go live!
