Countries

International P2P Lending Marketplaces – Loan Volumes April 2015

wiseclerk 2 Comments
In the chart below are the loan originations for April. I do monitor development of p2p lending figures for many markets. Since I already have most of the data on file I can publish statistics on the monthly loan originations for selected p2p lending services.
Investors living in markets with no or limited choice of local p2p lending services can check this list of marketplaces open to international investors.

P2P Lending volume 05/2015
Table: P2P Lending Volumes in April 2015. Source: own research
Note that volumes have been converted from local currency to Euro for the sake of comparison. Some figures are estimates/approximations.
*Prosper and Lending Club no longer publish origination data for the most recent month

Notice to p2p lending services not listed: Continue reading →

P2P Lending Service Lendico Raises 20M EUR From Rocket Internet and Other Investors

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German P2P Lending Service Lendico raised 20M EUR fromLendico Logo Rocket Internet, Access Industries, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and a new investor. Lendico will use the raised capital to further develop the p2p loan and SME loan service and to invest in the marketplace technology and the team.

‘We have won another experienced strategic partner, who will join Lendico as a long term investor. Together we share the belief that in order to originate loans to consumers and businesses in future banks are no longer needed’, said Lendico CEO Dominik Steinkühler (own translation; original statement is in German language). ‘To have strong funding is an important strategic advantage in a fast growing market environment. Lendico will use the momentum and strengthen its position as a leading international marketplace lender. Together with our investors we will continue to work on breaking the predominance of banks and offer a better alternative to make loans to consumers and businesses.’ (own translation; original statement is in German language)

Oliver Samwer, CEO Rocket Internet SE stated: „We build Lendico as a digital alternative to banks, when it comes to more affordable and faster loans for businesses and consumers. In the Fintech sector we are at the begin of a development that we already experienced in E-Commerce: Incumbents are outpaced by new digital players. With Lendico we actively push ahead this process.’ (own translation; original statement is in German language)

Update: Lendico did not comment on the identity of the new investor. Unconfirmed sources say that the London hedge fund Arrowgrass Capital invested. Arrowgrass was founded in February 2008 and is already invested in Zopa.

Update: Current Status of my Bondora Portfolio

wiseclerk 6 Comments

In October 2012 I started p2p lending at Bondora. Since then I periodically wrote on my experiences – you can read my last review here. Since the start I did deposit 14,000 Euro (approx. 15,600 US$). My portfolio is very diversified. Most loan parts I hold are for loan terms between 36 and 60 months. Together the loans add up to 20,616 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 2,397 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 2,623 Euro principal is stuck in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 13,261 Euro in repaid principal back – this figures includes loans Bondora cancelled before payout. I reinvested all repayments.

Bondora Investments 04/15
Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status

At the moment I have 0 Euro in bids in open market listings and 741 Euro cash available, which is rather high but it will take only 2 to 3 loans that match my investment criteria to allocate the money.

Bondora 04/15
Chart 2: Screenshot of account balance

Return on Invest

Currently Isepankur shows my ROI to be 27.22%. In my own calculations, using XIRR in Excel, assuming that 30% of my 60+days overdue and 15% of my overdue loans will not be recovered, my ROI calculations result in 19.6%. Continue reading →

How I Explored P2P Lending – My Review Part II

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This is part II of a guest post by British investor ‘GSV3Miac’. Read part I first.

Most of my concerns about P2P lending revolve around its relative immaturity. Even ZOPA, the oldest in the UK, has only been around 10 year or so, and have changed ‘just about everything’ at least twice. Funding Circle (“FC”)have 3-4 years history, but there have been no two years where the business has actually been stable (maximum loan sizes, loan terms, Institutional participation, etc. have all changed pretty much continually over the period I’ve been investing). How well the companies, and their borrowers, would survive a real recession, can only be guessed at.

What do I actually invest in? Well practically anything if the rate looks good. My ‘core holding’ is in RS, but there is nearly as much spread across the P2B platforms. For extra P2P related risk (and maybe reward) I also signed up to invest in the Assetz and Commuter Club capital raises (via SEEDRS). With EIS investments some of the money at risk is renated tax, which you had a 100% certainty of losing to the government anyway.

I do not plan to hold most of my investments (particularly in FC) for the full 5 years. After a few months the financial data is well out of date (much of it is already out of date when the loan is approved!) and unless you want to spend time checking how the company is doing, it is easier to sell the loans on and start anew.

Similarly if rates start to move dramatically, it’s time to ‘flip’ or ‘churn’ .. selling a 7% loan part when rates move to 9% is possible, but might sting a bit. Selling a 7% loan part when rates have moved to 14% is going to hurt a lot, or might be completely impossible. If rates move the other way, selling a 7% loan part when average rates are 6% is not only easy, it may be profitable (assuming the platform allows marking up). You might wind up with un-invested funds, but as someone succinctly put it on the P2P forum, ‘un-invested is a lot less painful than lost’.

The future looks equally interesting .. we are promised P2P investments within an ISA (do NOT hold your breath, this seems to be moving at a glacial pace so far), which could result in a ‘wall of money’ arriving on the scene. We are promised P2P losses to be tax deductible (against income, rather than capital gains), which has an impact on the worth of a protection fund. We will inevitably see some new entrants appear as the P2P area grows and become more attractive (Hargreaves Lansdown, a very large fund management player, has already indicated they might get involved, I believe). We will equally inevitably see some more of the current players merge or vanish, and many of the loans default.

As I may have mentioned a couple of times, nothing has been very stable so far .. most of the platforms are still ‘feeling their way’ with immature software (this is polite-speak for ‘bugs’), and business models/systems which are still evolving. The basic P2P premise of connecting people with money with people who want it, without too much activity in the middle, does not appear to scale too well when the number of each side get big (a million people bidding to fund a thousand loans each day is not something to contemplate lightly). Platforms need to grow to survive and they need to grow in balance – if they double the number of lenders, they need twice as many willing borrowers, and vice versa .. Asymmetrical growth just annoys whoever is on the surplus side, distorts the rates, and results in no growth at all – you need both a lender and a borrower to have any business. It is obvious, but very hard to manage. Continue reading →

Funding Circle Announces 150M Investment led by DST Global

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Funding Circle LogoFunding Circle, p2p lending marketplace for SME loans, announced today that it has raised 150 million US$ in equity capital, in a round led by DST Global, with participation from Baillie Gifford, a fund managed by BlackRock, Sands Capital Ventures and Temasek. Goldman Sachs acted as exclusive placement agent for the oversubscribed round. The new funding will be used to consolidate the UK and US markets and fuel further growth.

The investment comes as lending to small businesses via the marketplace surges past the 1 billion US$ mark globally, following sustained growth in both the UK and US markets. Investors at Funding Circle are on track to lend 1 billion US$ over the next year, showcasing the huge potential of marketplace lending on the global economy.

Launched in 2010, Funding Circle is sparking a revolution in the way small businesses access finance, disrupting the traditional model of banking. Through the Funding Circle marketplace in the US, qualified individual investors and institutions can invest in successful small businesses looking for growth capital. In the UK, the Funding Circle marketplace is currently the fifth largest net lender to small businesses*, while in the US, lending in the first quarter of this year was seven times larger than lending in the first quarter of 2014.

Samir Desai, CEO and co-founder of Funding Circle said: “We believe Funding Circle is the future of small business finance globally, and it’s a vision we share with some of the largest and most respected investors in the world. Today’s news is the next step on our journey to creating a sustainable, category-defining business in a multi-billion dollar global market, where businesses will come to the marketplace to borrow from all types of investors. This investment, alongside prudent risk management, will ensure Funding Circle’s long term future.”

Sam Hodges, US Managing Director and co-founder said: “Today’s capital injection will allow us to accelerate efforts in the United States and help us better serve the 28 million Main Street small businesses many banks have left behind. This year, we’ll continue to invest heavily in technology and talent as we build a transparent, sustainable and diverse marketplace that helps American small businesses get access to the $40 billion per month they need to expand and grow.” Continue reading →

How I Explored P2P Lending – My Review Part I

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This is part I of a guest post by British investor ‘GSV3Miac’.

About the author.. I spent 25 or so years in software engineering, programming everything from IBM mainframes to microchips in early Hotpoint washing machines. I must have been halfway competent (or not) since I wound up managing a software development group, a large IBM computer centre, workstations of networks and PCs. When my (American owned) factory shut down I spent the last year (in between managing the closure) retraining as an IFA. I qualified, but I never actually practised – I took my redundancy / pension and headed for the hills (of Shropshire). That was a while ago, so don’t expect me to know chapter and verse on the latest tax wrinkles! *grin*

How did I get into P2P (misnamed .. it’s largely P2B these days .. much of is headed for B2B!) lending? Blame my mother .. she died, and left me a sum of money which was not expected, and not really critical to my future. Having no children (there being, IMO, no people shortage on the planet) it is probably all headed for charities one day, so I thought I might as well have some fun with it. Before I did that, I had, of course, gone through the approved checklist .. i.e.

‘Emergency’ easy access cash account(s) .. tick.

Pay off the mortgage .. tick.

ISA(s) .. tick

Pension Provisions .. tick

Stock market investments / bonds / shares / funds ..tick

OK, anything left can be risked a bit. (I accept that stocks and shares and even cash has =some= risk attached, but now we are looking at ‘high wire with no net’ type options .. VCTs, EIS schemes, and yep .. P2P lending). If you want to plan for ultimate disaster (Ebola pandemic, nuclear war and global financial meltdown) then probably investing in long dated canned food, and an underground shelter on an island upwind from everywhere, is your best bet. More modest (and likely) risks can be mitigated by spreading your investments around a lot, and by being conservative in your assumptions of what you might get back.

I started my P2P journey (in 2013) with Funding Circle (henceforth ‘FC’) and ZOPA, both of which I had heard about from a friend, and I dipped my toes in rather gingerly at first. ZOPA had been going for some time, and I probably missed their best years (when you could decide who to lend to, and later when you could at least still decide at what rate you’d lend). ZOPA had just introduced their ‘safeguarded’ lending, and started fixing the rates, so even their name (‘Zone Of Possible Agreement’) no longer made sense. I stopped lending with them after less than 6 months .. the rates were just not attractive (and unpredictably so). On the plus side, the exit from ZOPA was fairly cheap and painless.

As an alternative to ZOPA I went to look at Ratesetter (RS), which still lets you set the rate(s) you are willing to lend at over 1,3 or 5 years (or monthly). No control over who gets it, but at least some control over what they pay; and (like modern ZOPA) there is a provision fund which should hopefully protect you from bad debts. Exit from RS can be quite expensive though, so best to lend for no longer than you are sure you can do without the money for. Basically they charge you the difference between the rate you would have got for the actual period you lent for, and the rate you got by lending for a longer period. I still like them, for simplicity with just enough control to make it interesting, and I lend / recycle in the 3 and 5 year markets depending on the rates at the time (typically I expect at least an extra 1% for signing up for the extra 2 years). Continue reading →