When I first learnt about peer-to-peer lending, I thought, "Oh dear, the banks aren't going to like that, I wonder how long it will be until they get their mates in the government to put a stop to it."
Now the fightback has started. As Matthew Lynn points out in Moneyweek "P2P is doing to finance what the web has done to dozens of other industries, - cutting out the middlemen" and then, unsurprisingly: "From April next year, the fast-growing P2P lending and crowd-funding industries will start being regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority".
The FCA, of course professes that they are trying to protect investors from taking "inappropriate" levels of risk, whatever that may mean, but it is fairly obvious that they are just doing the job of every regulator, which is to protect incumbents from nasty upstart competitors by raising barriers to entry, one of the only things the FCA and its predecessor, the FSA, manages to do with any degree of success.
As Matthew Lynn points out "Indeed, if there is anything customers need protecting from, it is the traditional banks and fund managers, not the people offering a better deal than they do."
