German p2p lending service Lendico announced yesterday that an unnamed international hedge fund and 2 german banks will invest over 100 million Euro in loans on the Lendico marketplaces. The management sees that as a mark of confidence. Lendico is committed to increase activities in its growing core markets and plans to expand the product into SME loans. Continue reading
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The Harmoney Story
This is a guest post by Neil Roberts, CEO of Harmoney
About Harmoney
Harmoney is New Zealand’s first and only licensed peer to peer lending platform, founded by serial financial services entrepreneurs with several successful start-ups and exits that have created shareholder wealth in excess of $1bn. Harmoney launched in September of 2014 with NZ$100m of institutional funding, and recently announced a successful NZ$10m round of funding lead by Trade Me, the leading online marketplace in New Zealand, currently accounts for 70% of the entire country’s online domestic traffic!
The New Zealand Story
We are a small country, globally significant in so much as we are regularly the test bed for financial services innovation due to the high adoption rate of technology, Western culture and contained geography. Up until mid-2014, most New Zealanders had never heard of peer to peer lending, and the FinTech/AltFin industry was not strongly established.
Why? Dominated by four Australian owned and protected banks, New Zealand’s financial market has grown stagnant.  Our “Big-4†banks are protected by Aussie legislation known as the “four pillar†policy, which has not only allowed the creation an artificial oligopoly, but also made those four banks among the most profitable in the world – even more than their Australian counterparts. Without much in the way of serious challenge, these banks have dominated the market with neither need nor motivation to change.
It’s created a perfect storm for the introduction of peer to peer lending. The passing of the Financial Markets Conduct Act (FMCA) – a Bill that was applauded as “once-in-a-generation†(http://www.interest.co.nz/business/66116/once-generation-financial-markets-conduct-bill-passed-law) – in April last year opened the doors to a fully licensed and regulated crowdfunding and peer to peer lending industry in New Zealand.
Of a handful of known applications, Harmoney is at this stage the first and only peer to peer lending platform to be licensed. The licensing process is very thorough – and appropriately so. New verticals and business models within the financial sector will inevitably be treated with caution, both by regulators and by the public. We have long held the belief that a thoroughly audited and strictly regulated industry will be safer for customers and foster greater public trust. Continue reading
Goldman Sachs Quantifies Potential Impact of US P2P Lending on Bank Profits
Goldman Sachs published the research paper ‘The Future of Finance’ analysing the potential impact of alternative finance companies, especially p2p lending marketplaces, on the US banking sector.
Goldman Sachs states ‘We see the largest risk of disintermediation by non-traditional players in: 1) consumer lending, 2) small business lending, 3) leveraged lending (i.e., loans to non-investment grade businesses), 4) mortgage banking (both origination and servicing), 5) commercial real estate and 6) student lending. In all, [US] banks earned ~$150bn in 2014, and we estimate $11bn+ (7%) of annual profit could be at risk from non-bank disintermediation over the next 5+ years.‘
Between the Towers in March
Yesterday I attended the ‘Between the Towers‘ event in Frankfurt, which is organized by Mainincubator, the Commerzbank backed fntech incubator. The event format features a keynote speaker, followed by 4 startups delivering 7 minute pitches. Continue reading
International P2P Lending Services – Loan Volumes February 2015
As February was a shorter month, loan originations fell compared to January with some exceptions. Ratesetter and Funding Circle are in a neck-and-neck race for largest volume figure this month. Prosper and Lending Club no longer publish origination data for the most recent month. I added two more services. I do monitor development of p2p lending figures for many markets. Since I already have most of the data on file I can publish statistics on the monthly loan originations for selected p2p lending services.
Investors living in markets with no or limited choice of local p2p lending services can check this list of marketplaces open to international investors.
Table: P2P Lending Volumes in February 2015. Source: own research
Note that volumes have been converted from local currency to Euro for the sake of comparison. Some figures are estimates/approximations.
Notice to p2p lending services not listed: Continue reading
P2P Lending Marketplace Bondora Fuels European Expansion Plans
P2P lending service Bondora, headquartered in Tallinn, announced that they raised 5M US$ Series A round led by Valinor Management to fuel further expansion plans for cross-border lending in Europe. Richard Fay and Ragnar Meitern also invested. Bondora was the first p2p lending service doing cross-border lending for retail investors. Bondora is currently facilitating loans to borrowers in Estonia, Spain, Finland and Slovakia from investors in all European countries. Bondora states that investments on the marketplace have consistently yielded premium returns to investors while simultaneously delivering competitive rates to borrowers through efficiency and lower interest rate spread.
Uniting European markets under the roof of a single platform creates a huge opportunity given the size of the population in the continent and the volume of outstanding debt. Thus, Eurozone countries alone account for 340 million people and EUR 1.1 trillion in outstanding consumer credit debt, a market equivalent to US. Lending to borrowers in markets that are independently relatively small (even Germany, the largest economy in Europe is only approximately twice the size of California in terms of GDP) allows earning premium returns due to lack of competition among traditional lenders.
Pärtel Tomberg, CEO and co-founder of Bondora, said he hoped the cash infusion from Valinor Management, the hedge fund run by David Gallo, will allow his company to build the more complex infrastructure needed to make more cross-border loans. ‘The goal is really to become a global market,’ Pärtel Tomberg said in an interview. ‘There are no precedents in the world on many of the things we want to do.’
The company also wants to attract institutional lenders from the US.
A possible mid-term competitor might be Lending Club. But Lending Club said in the investor conference call on Tuesday that they will focus on the US market and will not use the capital raised in their December IPO on international expansion plans in the near future. Renauld Laplanche is however monitoring international developments in the market: ‘We’ll see what model is really the winning model in any particular geography.’ Continue reading