An alternative finance lending revolution is underway in the UK, with peer-to-peer lender platforms poised to “go mainstream” in 2016, a finance expert has predicted.

Speaking to the Financial Times, KPMG’s head of alternative finance, Warren Mead, said that a number of fledgling companies in the peer-to-peer lender space are likely to grow substantially in 2016. Investment in fintech, he believes, will climb from $20 billion this year to $30 billion next – a huge rise on the $12 billion invested in 2014.

2016, Mead says, could be “the year in which peer-to-peer (P2P) lending becomes mainstream – expect significant growth and continued investor appetite. We might even see the first UK initial public offering of a P2P business.”

Over the last year, traditional lenders have been scrambling to stay abreast of the latest developments in alternative finance or risk having their business models disrupted or even killed off by agile fintech companies.

P2P lenders have provided loans to many who the banks have rejected, chiefly small businesses and individuals. They’re also growing at a rapid rate: cumulative lending through these platforms in the UK surged from £2.6 billion at the end of Q1 2015 to £3.7 billion at the end of Q3.

Traditional banks have many different forms of hugely expensive IT systems in place, and have as a result been slow to embrace the new technology of the challenger lenders. An example of the latter is the UK’s “Unbolted” P2P lender, which provides secured asset loans to individuals and SMEs in a very unique way: eschewing credit searches entirely, Unbolted collateralises a valuable asset owned by its borrowers as security for the loan.