The specialist peer-to-peer lender made this decision to avoid a decrease in funding, which would affect existing loans and potentially lead to material losses for borrowers and investors.

The changes — effective immediately — will require withdrawal requests to be matched by new investment coming into the account.

A queue of withdrawal requests will be in operation, sorted by date and any notice requirement.

This process will continue until all loans that access account investors hold within those accounts which have future funding requirements are fully funded.

Assetz said it expects this process to last for approximately 12 months, unless circumstances change.

In addition, no new loans will be funded by access accounts following the restrictions, in order to speed the withdrawal process.

Stuart Law, CEO at Assetz (pictured above), said: “Over the last year we have finally seen substantial rises in bank interest rates after well over ten years of them languishing at near zero levels.

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“This has led to the 4-5% target interest rate access accounts, a very modest part of our overall funding sources for the last few years, becoming less competitive than they were versus rates offered for some bank savings products.

“We recently raised the rates on the access accounts and saw healthy net inflows of capital for a period.

“However, after continued Bank of England interest rate rises, the access accounts are currently not attracting sufficient new capital for new lending from that source.

“In order to complete the funding for all types of projects already underway through all of our active retail loans, we have started to limit withdrawals from the access accounts in order to prioritise all existing loans being fully funded to completion, as you would expect.

“No new retail-funded loans will be funded by the access accounts whilst this situation continues, but we will continue to draw on our growing network of institutional partners to fund new lending activity going forward."