Trillion Fund

» see trillionfund.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Michael Stein and Phillip Riches founded Trillion Fund in London in 2011, registered as company number 07613567 and later carrying FCA registration 727113. The proposition was that ordinary people should be able to put money into renewable energy projects directly, rather than hoping a pension fund did it on their behalf, and that the returns on a wind farm were legible enough for a retail investor to judge.

It attracted a particular kind of backer. Vivienne Westwood put money in and lent her name to it. Albion London took a stake in April 2014 in exchange for building the platform's interface. Mark Stevenson sat on the advisory board. In July 2014 it announced a merger with Buzzbnk, a social-enterprise funding site, and the combined platform claimed fourteen thousand members and the title of Britain's biggest social crowdfunding operation.

Theresa Burton ran it as chief executive through the part that went wrong. In 2015 the UK government cut subsidies for renewable energy, and Burton's own account of what followed is unusually direct: after the decision to suddenly withdraw support from the sector, the company could not secure enough deal flow. A lending platform with nothing to lend against is just a website with regulatory permissions.

~ the record ~

~ the name ~

The trillion came from a United Nations estimate that keeping warming below two degrees required roughly a trillion dollars of investment annually, and the company was built on the argument that a number that large could not be met by institutions alone. Naming yourself after the gap is a brave thing to do, because it fixes forever the distance between what you set out to move and what you actually moved.

~ the subsidy cut ~

Having stopped offering loans to the public, the company tried in 2016 to sell the machinery instead. Your Brand Crowdfunding was a white-label version of the platform that let other organizations run funding campaigns on their own websites. Burton later said the concept tested well in market research and then failed to convert, which is the most common obituary in software.

By March 2017 it was openly for sale. What was left to sell: interim regulatory permissions, six hundred lenders, and a three million pound loan book scheduled to close with a final repayment in April 2018. Burton's verdict on the market she had been competing in deserves quoting, because it explains the whole sector's consolidation in one line: it had become very crowded, and you needed a loan book of around a hundred million pounds just to break even.

~ where the code went ~

On 7 January 2019 the buyer walked. The interested party, shareholders were told, no longer wanted to enter the peer-to-peer market at all. What happened next was unusually decent for a failed fintech. Every loan and every short-term creditor was paid in full. The long-term creditors, chief among them Vivienne Westwood, with Joseph Corre and Michael Norton alongside her, agreed to write down what they were owed and close the company in an orderly way, on one condition: the technology had to be given to a registered UK charity. It went to the Centre for Innovation in Voluntary Action. The company expected the wind-down to take four to six months and said it would keep a minimum of infrastructure running until the FCA permissions were surrendered.

It took about a year. On 22 December 2019, at 10:53 in the morning, somebody published a replacement homepage and the platform became one sentence: the Trillion Fund website is closed. Underneath it, a note that Trillion Fund Ltd had also run Fundit.Buzz, formerly Buzzbnk, which had closed in December 2017. The domain has since drifted into a hosting company's archive, where it now returns a 404 at a URL built out of the closing sentence itself. The epitaph became a file path.

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