Christian Faes is co-founder and CEO of LendInvest, the UK's leading online mortgage lender and one of the UK's fastest-growing FinTech companies. Christian and his business partner, Ian Thomas, launched LendInvest in 2013 to bring technology to the £1.2 trillion UK mortgage market, which is entirely offline and largely untouched by the FinTech movement. LendInvest's technology makes it easier and faster for creditworthy borrowers to access mortgage finance, and gives more people access to invest in secured property loans. Best known for its online investment platform, LendInvest also runs two discretionary, regulated funds for private clients and wealth managers, as well as several funding lines of behalf of UK and international banks.
Before LendInvest, Christian and Ian founded Montello which became one of the UK's leading short-term mortgage lenders, and out of which LendInvest was spun.
Christian is a qualified solicitor with corporate finance and real estate experience. He was previously a securitisation lawyer at Clifford Chance and in-house legal counsel for Deutsche Bank. Before founding Montello in 2008, Christian was involved in a mortgage lending business in his native Australia. Christian is also an active supporter of the FinTech and PropTech sectors, and an investor in startups such as Seedrs and Plentific.
Today, LendInvest is a well-capitalised and profitable company. By adopting a diversified lending model with a healthy mix of investors, the platform is well positioned for sustainable and sensible scale. To date, investors have invested more than £770m in loans to hundreds of borrowers to finance 2,600 new and rebuilt homes worth over £1.3 billion.