Author: wiseclerk

P2P Lending Service Moneyauction Wins Savings Bank as Lender

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In Korea, p2p lending service Moneyauction became so attractive for lenders that it won a Savings Bank as a lender. A company spokesman told P2P-Banking.com that the bank evaluated the repayment rate of borrowers on the p2p lending site and found it to be better compared to the rate of it’s own existing customer base even though the p2p borrowers credit scores are lower than the credit scores of their customers. Other financial institutions have expressed interest in utilising Moneyauction or entering cooperations.

Moneyauction is advancing in it’s product development. In March it released the new ‘Automatic portfolio lending’ feature as well as support for mobile bidding via smartphones. Lenders can now bid on loans using smart phones like the iPhone (see picture).

(Source: company management)

Smava Enters Marketing Partnership with Cortal Consors Bank

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Smava has entered a marketing cooperation with Cortal Consors bank. Cortal Consors will promote Smava as a new asset class to it’s customer. Smava will pay Cortal Consors referral fees for referred lenders and borrowers.

Newsworthy is that this is the first marketing deal a bank has entered in with a p2p lending service. The implications of the deal itself are rather unspectacular as the information is buried deep inside the Cortal Consors website where few are likely to see it.

In other news Smava has redesigned the website and changed the slogan a couple of days ago. The former slogan was “Kredite von Mensch zu Mensch” which roughly translates to “Loans from human to human”. The new slogan is “Direkt Kredit” (engl. “direct loan(s)”). The motivation of this change according to Smava was to enhance the message that loans are direct, easy, and competitive. Smava says borrowers had wrong associations with the old slogan, thinking that long negotiations with individual lenders would be necessary.

Published feedback by users (lenders) on the new slogan critisizes that the new slogan resembles those of impersonal financial institutions – an image that p2p lending services aimed to differentiate themselves from.

Happy Anniversary: 3 Years Smava Lending

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Smava.de launched 3 years ago and successfully established p2p lending in Germany. Since then about 25 million Euro (approx. 34.4 million US$) loans were funded. Smava  gained nearly all positive feedback by lenders, borrowers and especially the media.

Smava will need to continue growing considerably in order to become profitable. Currently growth is limited by borrower demand. On the lender side there is much capital waiting to be invested.

One issue Smava will have to tackle in the future are the default rates that distinctly exceed originally forecasted values. So far these have not been a threat to growth because  the ‘Anleger-Pools‘ mechanism, an insurance mechanism spreading losses resulting from defaults over many lenders, prevented major losses for single lenders. In the past years nearly all lenders achieved positive ROIs.

The P2P-Kredite blog has published a longer analysis today: ‘3 Jahre Smava Kredite – eine Bilanz‘ (in German).