Latvian p2p lending marketplace Mintos today announced a buyback guarantee for all car loans issed by Mogo that are currently on the marketplace or will be listed on the platform until July 31st, 2015. The buyback guarantee applies for the lifetime of these secured car loan. Under the agreement Mintos concluded with Mogo, Mogo will buy back any of those loans that are 60 or more days delinquent.
All secured car loans are originated, pre-funded, and serviced by mogo. It means that similar to real estate backed loans, Mintos puts on the platform already funded loans (and most have had a number of successful payments) and investors can start earning interest from the moment they have invested in a loan. Mogo keeps 5% of each loan on its books.
This construct provides additional security to investors – a bit like the provision funds some UK marketplaces maintain; only that in this case it currently is a limit-time guarantee.
Taaleritehdas invested 2 million EUR in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending company Fellow Finance Oy and, at the same time, sold the entire stock of its Financing Company Lainaamo Ltd to Fellow Finance Oy as a share exchange. Lainaamo has a consumer credit portfolio of approximately 20 million EUR with thousands of consumer customers. After the acquisition, Taaleritehdas owns 38.4% of Fellow Finance Oy. In addition, Taaleritehdas has an option to increase its holding in the company by 7.3%. Fellow Finance’s founders, Jouni Hintikka and Teemu Nyholm, each own 18.4% of the company. In total, Fellow Finance key persons have a 57.3% holding in the company.
According to its vision, Taaleritehdas aims to develop the Finnish capital market. Taaleritehdas believes that increased direct financing will be one of the most significant changes in the finance industry in the future. The focus in financing will increasingly shift from the bank-centric approach towards direct financing. Another strong megatrend in the financing sector, as seen by Taaleritehdas, is digitalisation. Both Fellow Finance and Lainaamo offer their services completely online. Ownership of Fellow Finance enables Taaleritehdas to offer its customers a new investment form and to utilise digitalisation in its own activities, as well. The merger of Lainaamo and Fellow Finance will not affect the position of borrower customers or investors. Continue reading →
Bitcoin lending platform Bitbond today announced an angel funding round of 600,000 EUR. The round brings Bitbond’s raised capital to a total of 800,000 EUR.
Led by Bitbond’s earlier seed investor Point Nine Capital, a number of business angels contributed to the round. Among them were Florian Heinemann, Uwe Horstmann, Christian Vollmann and Felix Jahn. Bitbond will use the additional funds to grow its user base and to increase its activity in emerging markets which are underserved by traditional lenders. The platform went live in July 2013. Since then over 600 loans were originated through the platform.
Founder & CEO of Bitbond Radoslav Albrecht said: “The additional resources will help us to continue realizing our mission which is to make lending and borrowing globally accessible. We are happy to have such experienced investors supporting us on this exciting journey.â€
According to the IFC (International Finance Corporation of the World Bank) the global credit gap of microenterprises and small and medium sized businesses is around USD 2 trillion. Bitbond seeks to help solve this problem by creating a global market for small business loans that is accessible to everyone via the internet.
Since its first external funding in August 2014 Bitbond introduced a number of technological advancements. These include exchange rate pegged loans which allow borrowers and lenders to mitigate bitcoin price fluctuations.
Editor’s comment: My personal opinion is that cross-border lending based on bitcoin is currently a high risk proposition to investors. While I appreciate some of the technological advantages the platform pursues, I think further development is needed, especially in debt collection processes.
Latvia p2p lending marketplace Mintos announced today that it expands and now offers p2p loans – secured by cars as collateral to borrowers in Lithuania. This is the third country Mintos operates in after Latvia and Estonia. Mintos is open to international investors from Europe – the website states 1,200 registered investors from 26 countries.
The car loans in Lithuania are originated in cooperation with Mogo – a partner Mintos is already using in Estonia, where they together funded 250 car loans for a total of 300K EUR.
When investing in secured car loans investors enter in a direct contract with a borrower – similar to real estate backed loans the contract with respective borrower is transferred from Mogo to investor based on assignment. According to assignment agreement, part of the interest that borrowers pay is not assigned to investors and remains with Mogo to compensate it for loan origination and servicing. Continue reading →
Lendify is the first and leading peer-to-peer lending platform focused on prime borrowers in the unsecured consumer credit space in Sweden. We have handled loan applications for over SEK 350 MM and more than 3,000 lenders and borrowers have signed up since launch in August 2014.
What are the three main advantages for investors?
High risk-adjusted returns.
Access to unsecured personal loans extended to prime borrowers in a very low-default rate market (Sweden) with many years of well documented historical data.
A new type of investments that further diversifies a mixed investment portfolio.
What are the three main advantages for borrowers?
Personalized interest rate.
Transparent (all interests and fees are clearly presented and available to all site visitors)
Simple and fast process for applying and monitoring (borrowers can log in and see status of payments etc.)
What ROI can investors expect?
It is still early days for P2P lending in Sweden but we expect 7% on average.
Lendify received 2M EUR in funding recently. Who are the backers?
Fredrik Wallenberg, Hans Westin & Sten Schröder where the two latter have a great track record in the Swedish consumer lending space.
Is the technical platform self-developed?
Yes, everything is developed in-house.
What was the greatest challenge so far in the course launching Lendify?
Being the first in a market is great, but it also provides challenges out of a marketing and regulatory perspective. Not many people in Sweden are aware of the concept “peer-to-peer lendingâ€, and we work hard to educate people of the concept. Continue reading →
Lendix is an online marketplace for business loans, enabling investors to lend directly to prime small and medium sized enterprises. We started operating in France, making our first loans in April 2015. We’ve made 1.5M EUR of loans in our first month, and are on track for a similar number in May.We lend from 30,000 EUR to 1,000,000 EUR for 18 to 60 months with rates varying from 4% to 9%.
What are the three main advantages for investors?
We offer access to a largely untapped and high quality market, with low defaults and low prepayments. We have the same information as the banks via our Banque de France database membership. Last but not least, we charge no fees to lenders.
What are the three main advantages for borrowers?
We’re fast, easy and transparent:
– we make offers in 7 business days and our docs are written in plain French
– we guarantee the funding of all the loans we put on the platform
– we require no personal guarantees from the company directors
What ROI can investors expect?
5.5% to 6%.
How did you start Lendix? Is the company funded with venture capital?
Lendix was founded by Olivier Goy in Q3 2014.
France was one of the first countries to lift the legal uncertainties around crowdlending and we saw an opportunity to plug the funding gap that micro and small businesses suffer from. There is a vast amount of capital available to lend, but small businesses find that dealing with banks has become so painful and distracting that they effectively don’t even start the process. Our aim is to surprise borrowers with how painless it is to get a loan.
The company’s shareholders (apart from its leadership) includes a VC, Partech Ventures. Olivier has a long standing relationship with Partech, having worked there himself, and having had Partech has one of the shareholders of the Private Equity company he founded in 2001.
We also have a bank, an asset manager, a family office and a large corporate amongst our backers.
An important point is that Olivier, myself and the other main shareholders of Lendix have skin in the game: we have committed money to our institutional vehicle and lend to every company that comes on the platform, under the same conditions as all the other lenders. Continue reading →
