This article is taken from Investment Week, where Intelligent Partnership was mentioned. Click here to read

In the conventional funds space, creative destruction and remorseless change is at work, with clean pricing a genuine game-changer.

The ETF juggernaut keeps on pushing forward, with recent numbers from ETFGI suggesting global inflows continue remorselessly: listed index-trackers now have some $2.64trn in assets.

Outside the mainstream of equity and bond funds, we have seen much less innovation, especially for the cash sitting in client accounts in need of a decent income.

One glimmer of hope in this respect might come from a much younger disruptive sector – the alternative finance spectrum. This small, but very noisy, sector includes everything from VC-orientated crowdfunding equity through to P2P lending.

This latter segment is now making a big play for advisers’ money. Over the last few weeks, for instance, the fast-growing RateSetter has been especially busy.

As well as the first P2P loans ratings from FE, we have seen the announcement that the government backed British Business Bank is going to channel some of its money through Ratesetter’s platform. Ratesetter has also announced a new bespoke platform aimed specifically at wealth advisers.

Ratesetter is not the only platform targeting IFAs.Outfits including Abundance have been working very closely with IFA-orientated researchers such as Intelligent Partnership to target retail money.

A wide range of income-orientated structures for client portfolios are now on offer across the market – debentures secured on clean energy assets via Abundance, next generation ‘mini-bonds’ through Crowdcube, mainstream SME loans through Funding Circle and, of course, those consumer loans from RateSetter and Zopa.

If we cut through the data and marketing noise, a number of key turning points seem to have been reached. Just as IFA-specific platforms are being launched, we are also seeing the emergence of a first wave of sensible ratings analysis.

This coincides with those numbers I mentioned earlier becoming big and liquid enough for large institutions to pump in serious amounts of money. The Liberum and Marshall Wace-backed P2P Global Investments closed-ended fund has just raised £200m, for example.

All of which prompts the inevitable question about whether alternative finance is now big enough to make a disruptive impact?

While I would love to say yes, I am not sure we are quite there yet. Despite those growth rates, the actual scale of flows is still tiny. No bank or asset management company should really be challenged….yet.

I would also suggest a number of challenges remain at not just the asset class level, but also in the platform engineering space. The alternative finance space is coming of age at exactly the same time as interest rates start to rise, and bonds generally begin to look awfully unattractive.

The alternative finance platforms are not fazed by this turn of events and mount a good argument for suggesting they may, in fact, be the beneficiaries, but I think the jury is still out on that particular argument.

I am also not convinced many of the IFA platforms are really that ready for change. If these businesses have a problem dealing with bog standard ETFs, the mind boggles when one considers what they will make of P2P lending products.

Equally, I think there is a snowball in hell’s chance big D2C platforms such as Hargreaves Lansdown will let P2P or crowdfunding become a major part of their offering. Of course, there is also the challenge of needing to access this asset class through ISA and SIPPs – some form of tax wrapper is essential, but we are still months away from any sensible announcement.

I think there is also a knowledge gap. P2P lending and crowdfunding is indisputably risky, and many commentators have argued the reward is not high enough to justify the risks.

Working out the veracity of that statement depends on both detailed industry stats as well as asset class level research. Outfits like FE and AltFi Data are starting to address this challenge but we are still a long way from having proper research into the space. It could be 2016 before we reach a real turning point.