SME lending in the UK has been structurally undersupplied since the financial crisis, when the major banks retreated from business lending and never fully returned. Assetz Capital was founded in Manchester in 2012 to fill part of that gap through peer-to-peer lending to small and medium-sized businesses, secured against property and other assets. Its platform connected retail and institutional investors with UK businesses needing growth capital, development finance, or bridging loans — asset classes that required real underwriting expertise rather than algorithmic credit scoring. Assetz Capital became one of the largest P2P business lenders in the UK, developing a range of investment accounts offering different risk and return profiles to attract a broad investor base. The company transitioned to an institutional funding model in 2022, following a broader industry shift away from retail P2P toward institutional capital as the primary funding source. That transition preserved the core lending business while removing the operational complexity of managing a large retail investor base. In the landscape of UK alternative finance, Assetz Capital is one of the more durable examples of a P2P lender that found a sustainable model on the other side of the industry's regulatory and structural evolution.