Over the past decade, P2P lenders have carved an innovative niche at the periphery of the savings and loans market. On one hand, they provide loans to consumers (and, in some cases, businesses) that the UK banking ‘Big Four’ (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, RBS) will not lend to, and do so at rates of interest far removed from the astronomical APRs associated with payday lenders. On the other, they can offer savers far better rates of return than those provided by mainstream savings products.

Nevertheless, despite some growth in recent years, P2P has so far remained very much a fringe prospect; according to figures published by the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association, the industry lent a comparatively miniscule £1.2bn last year overall. This is almost certainly attributable to saver wariness of the sector; it was less than two years ago that P2P lending became regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and investments are not protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. While many P2P lenders have established their own safeguards to insulate savers from the impact of a default, the lack of an officially-mandated compensation provision undoubtedly serves as a deterrent to more widespread interaction.

However, this new challenger coalition should go some way to assuaging such reservations. Metro Bank will be pumping an undisclosed sum into the Zopa platform, to create more supply for borrowers. While this is good news for those seeking loans who find themselves frozen out by the ‘Big Four’, could it equally side-line savers by forcing down rates of interest? Zopa states that their rates are influenced by their competitors in the P2P sphere; if the average rate on offer is 5 per cent, then Zopa will offer rates at roughly that level. If Zopa remains true to this principle, savers will still receive better returns from placing their money in the platform rather than an ISA.

Kevin Caley, chief executive of P2P lender ThinCats, dubbed the deal “a significant milestone in the development of the peer-to-peer sector to date.”

“However, institutional investors already dominate the market in the USA and in the UK we need to make sure that they are not given special access to all the best deals through P2P. We are keen to keep individual lenders at the heart of our platform.”

Rebels who viewed P2P as a major challenge to traditional lenders, or at least the most effective means of circumventing them, may be disheartened that a prominent P2P player has shacked up with a high-street bank. However, the move could assist P2P’s elevation to an accepted asset class, and attract more savers to the P2P cause. As the introduction of a P2P ISA could come before the end of this year, the partnership may well be a timely one. Furthermore, Metro Bank has consistently demonstrated that it isn’t a typical high-street bank. Beyond longer opening hours, seven day a week branch access and printing debit cards on-site, Metro is the only high-street bank to have never covertly cut a customer’s savings rate, and has a policy of automatically upgrading customers to better rates if and when they become available. “Big banks tend to think about customer acquisition as a zero-sum game – if we win, they lose,” says Paul Riseborough, Metro Bank’s managing director of customer propositions.

“Consumers desperately want more choice and by partnering with Zopa we are able to offer something the ‘Big Four’ increasingly cannot afford to provide – really great service.”

The ‘Big Four’ would do well to follow Metro’s consumer-centric example. Recent months have indeed seen some attempts by the quartet to emulate the challenger’s policies; RBS and its subsidiary NatWest announced with much fanfare that they would keep 34 branches open on the 3 May Bank Holiday (surely coincidentally, there are also 34 Metro outlets in the UK); the number of Barclays branches that remain open for business on Saturday has slowly increased. Will the UK’s banking establishment now sneak in the footsteps of Zopa and Metro, and tap into the P2P market too? Only time will tell, although Mr. Caley believes “it is only a matter of time before the other banks recognise that P2P is a revolution that is not going to go away.”