The Salad Finance bond raise has brought in £4.3m from UK retail investors across five issuances, with the latest offer securing £860,000 alone, according to FinTech Global. The current offer remains open until 8 October 2026, with a stated maximum target of over £1 million for this round.
What the Salad Finance bond raise actually involves
Salad lends between £500 and £2,000 over periods of six to 24 months, targeting borrowers who are turned down by conventional lenders not because they are in financial difficulty but because their credit files are thin or non-existent. The company calls these people ‘credit invisible’: individuals in stable employment who nonetheless cannot satisfy traditional credit scoring systems. Funds are said to be typically available within two hours of approval.
The company uses Open Banking data and analysis of transaction histories to assess applicants’ current financial behaviour rather than their historical credit footprint. Whether that methodology performs better than conventional scoring over a full credit cycle is a claim Salad makes; independent validation of its default rates is not in the public domain.
Founded in 2018, according to FinTech Futures, Salad describes itself as the UK’s largest consumer lending Community Development Finance Institution (CDFI) and says it is the largest cumulative raiser of retail capital of any CDFI on the Ethex impact investing platform. Both of those are the company’s own characterisations, not independently verified rankings.
Investor profile and the Ethex platform
The latest bond round attracted 329 investors through Ethex, with 65% described as returning backers. That repeat-investor figure is the kind of data point that carries some weight: people who have held a previous bond and chosen to reinvest are making an informed decision, not a first-time punt. It does not, of course, tell you about the investors who did not return.
Craig Pennington, chief executive officer of Salad Finance, said the raise had exceeded its target before the closing date. ‘Every pound will go into affordable and ethical lending,’ he said, adding that traditional credit scoring ‘often exclude people with stable employment, including NHS and other public sector staff, based on outdated criteria or because of “thin” credit files.’ The bond will remain open until 8 October, he said, to allow the company to raise towards its maximum target.
Alan Campbell, founder of Salad, pointed to the broader context. ‘Millions of Brits struggle to access the right type of credit, and despite government efforts to tackle this, including the UK Financial Inclusion Strategy, this gap is only set to widen,’ he said. ‘This raise shows retail investors are ready to back the solution and help break the cycle of financial hardship for those locked out of mainstream credit.’
The policy backdrop and the scale of the problem
Around one in three UK adults have difficulty accessing affordable credit from mainstream lenders, a figure that has risen by 50% since 2016. Debt charity StepChange has reported that over half of those it surveyed, 51%, have struggled with debt. These are the conditions Salad says it is operating into.
Financial inclusion has been climbing the political agenda. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made several commitments to address the cost-of-living crisis since taking office, including removing VAT from domestic electricity bills. Whether that political attention translates into structural change for the lending market is a separate question from whether any single lender’s bond offer can move the dial.
What is verifiable here is narrower: a company founded in 2018, operating as a CDFI, has raised £4.3m cumulatively from retail investors across five bond offers on Ethex, with the fifth offer drawing 329 participants and a majority of returning backers. The Salad Finance bond raise closes on 8 October 2026.
