April 2026 marks a decade since the Innovative Finance ISA went live. For most of the industry, the IFISA is a product. For ShareIn, it’s a differentiator and it’s perfectly suited to our clients who are focused on making returns to investors in the near term.
We became an IFISA manager in December 2016. However back in 2019, HMRC clarified that IFISA needed to be afforded the protections of client money, using e-money wasn’t a solution for ISA money.
“HMRC does not consider subscriptions held in e-money wallets to meet these requirements.”
HMRC ISA Manager Bulletin 78
That clarification of expectations was the trigger for ShareIn to build and launch ShareInPay, our client money handling service. We had searched for an API first client money solution but couldn’t find one so we had to build it ourselves. (Further information about that experience here.)
Seven years on from that moment, we manage ISA administration for platforms across renewable energy, ethical investment, property lending, community finance, and impact bonds.
A quick recap: What the IFISA actually is
When George Osborne announced in the 2015 Budget that peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunded debt securities would become ISA-eligible from April 2016, it created an entirely new category of tax-advantaged investment. The Innovative Finance ISA sits alongside the Cash ISA and Stocks & Shares ISA, giving UK taxpayers a way to earn tax-free returns from lending directly to businesses, projects, and communities — without layers of intermediaries.
Over the decade, the scope has expanded — open-ended property funds and Long-Term Asset Funds (LTAFs) were brought into the IFISA in 2024, and the restriction on subscribing to only one IFISA per tax year was lifted. From April 2026, LTAFs move to the Stocks & Shares ISA, but the core IFISA proposition — direct lending, tax-free returns — remains intact.
Not for everyone. Exactly as intended.
Let’s not pretend the IFISA is a mass market proposition and quite rightly so, investments/loans are typically high risk, illiquid and not appropriate for many people. HMRC data shows that IFISA accounts are a tiny proportion of both Cash ISAs and Stocks & Shares ISAs.
But that’s not the point, investors using IFISAs aren’t passive savers chasing the best rate. They’re people who’ve made a deliberate choice to put their money into real projects — solar farms, community energy schemes, property development loans, social housing bonds and to earn a return while doing it.
The IFISA was never going to be the product for everyone. It was designed to be the product for people who want their money to do something specific, maybe do something they believe should happen, maybe something that has an impact. That’s exactly the kind of investor our clients serve, investors who want to decide themselves and have transparency of what they are financing.
What our clients have done with it
ShareIn’s role in the IFISA ecosystem is distinctive: we’re the infrastructure layer. We act as ISA manager, we provide the ISA API and administrative console, we handle HMRC reporting, we manage ISA transfers in and out, and we police subscription thresholds — all as a service to the platforms that sit in front of their investors. Here’s what that looks like in practice across some of our clients:
Ethex — the UK’s leading positive investment platform — uses our IFISA infrastructure to enable investors put their tax-free allowance into bonds issued by renewable energy cooperatives, community organisations, and social enterprises. Ethex investors have collectively channelled over £120 million into 200+ impact projects.
Energise Africa — offers IFISA-wrapped investment opportunities in pioneering organisations bringing clean and affordable energy access to families living off-grid in sub-Saharan Africa. Investors can deploy as little as £50 into bonds that deliver both a financial return and measurable social impact. ShareIn provides the ISA management and client money handling that makes this possible in a compliant, scalable way.
Abundance Investment — one of the original pioneers of UK crowdfunded green investment — uses an IFISA to give investors access to Community Municipal Investments, renewable energy projects, and council-backed green infrastructure bonds. Abundance was instrumental in lobbying for the creation of the IFISA in the first place, and ShareIn’s ISA infrastructure has supported their offering as it has grown.
Triodos Crowdfunding — the crowdfunding arm of Triodos Bank, one of Europe’s leading ethical banks — used our platform and ISA management to offer IFISA-wrapped investments in organisations delivering environmental, cultural, and social impact across the UK.
Shojin — a property investment platform — uses our white-label infrastructure to offer IFISA-eligible property development investments, giving investors tax-efficient exposure to UK real estate lending.
The common thread: these are platforms where the ISA wrapper isn’t just a tax benefit. It’s an enabler. It lets everyday investors participate in asset classes — direct lending, project finance, community bonds — that would otherwise sit behind institutional minimums or complex fund structures.
Why platforms don't build this themselves
Here’s what most people don’t appreciate about the IFISA: it’s operationally complex.
An ISA manager has to track subscriptions across tax years, manage flexible and non-flexible withdrawal rules, process transfers between ISA managers (within HMRC’s mandated timescales), hold client money in segregated accounts, reconcile daily, report annually to HMRC, and manage the edge cases that come with any long-running financial product.
For a platform operator whose core competency is originating loans or sourcing investment opportunities, building all of that from scratch is expensive, slow, and distracting. The costs are high for getting things wrong. That’s why they come to us.
ShareIn offers two models: we can act as the ISA manager directly (using our own HMRC approval and FCA authorisation), or we can provide our ISA API to platforms that hold their own ISA manager status, handling the administrative and reporting layer while they retain the regulatory relationship. Either way, the platform gets a production-ready ISA capability without building it themselves.
Our ISA API records transactional activity, polices thresholds, manages transfers, and produces the year-end HMRC reporting pack. The administrative console sits on top for day-to-day management. We’re experts in this and our clients leverage that expertise.
The next chapter
The IFISA’s tenth anniversary arrives at an interesting moment. The government has been signalling ISA reform for over a year. The Cash ISA annual limit drops to £12,000 from April 2027. LTAFs are moving to the Stocks & Shares ISA. The FCA’s new Public Offer Platform (POP) regime — live since January 2026 — is opening up new routes for companies to raise capital directly from investors.
For the IFISA specifically, these shifts create both challenge and opportunity. The product remains niche by the numbers, but the underlying trend is clear: more investors want direct, transparent exposure to real assets, and more businesses want to raise capital outside traditional banking and fund structures.
We’ve been building this infrastructure since 2019 and have navigated every regulatory twist along the way. If you’re exploring how to offer ISA-wrapped products to your customers, we’d love to talk.