No plans to regulate crowd-funding

The Government is looking at ways to better protect businesses and consumers engaging in non-traditional lending methods such as crowd-funding but has no current plans to widen regulation of the area.

The Central Bank yesterday issued a consumer notice on practices such as crowd-funding, where money is raised from a number of parties and peer-to-peer lending.

The notice warns that they remain unregulated here and are not required to comply with client asset rules. Consumers and businesses providing such funding are not protected by the deposit guarantee scheme or the Investor Compensation Company scheme, and cannot complain to the Financial Services Ombudsman if they encounter problems, as the office only deals with complaints relating to regulated firms.