Invoice discounting marketplace Investly released a new version of the website today offering a redesigned investor interface. Investly allows investors to finance invoices sold by British and Estonian SMEs. Since the launch 11 months ago the number and volume of invoices financed has steadily increased. On the other hand rising investor demand pushed down the interest rates during the auctions to the minimum rate of 8% often during the past weeks.
New Investly dashboard. View of my portfolio page. Click to enlarge
At the moment I don’t have any overdue payments – however in the past some payments were delayed for a few days. None of the invoices financed on Investly have defaulted so far.
Overall the new interface is a nice improvement and offers a better overview than the old layout. But there is still room for improvement. I would have liked it, if the tables were sortable for example. Continue reading →
Scandinavia’s equity crowdfunding platform, Fundedbyme, today received recognition as one of six operators for Peer-to-Peer crowdfunding by the Malaysian Securities Commission in the Asian region. This announcement positions Fundedbyme as the only European operator in the Asian region. The award was awarded to Fundedbyme Malaysia at the third annual SCxSC Digital Finance hosted by the Securities Commission Malaysia. Malaysian Minister of Finance, Najib Razak and SC chairman Ranjit Ajit Singh handed over the award to Fundedbyme Malaysia’s COO, Angelld Quah, and CEO Daniel Geottfert.
The Asian region is seeing an explosion in peer-to-peer activity, particularly, and crowdfunding in general,†says Daniel Daboczy, CEO and co-founder of Fundedbyme. “Fundedbyme is strategically positioned as the bridge between Scandinavia and Asia as we early-on saw the trend of cross-border investments – in the first equity crowdfunding campaign from Malaysia, Halal Speed Dating, we saw that 40% of investors came from Europe, which is very exciting for both Asian and European entrepreneurs,†Daboczy continues. The latest equity crowdfunding campaign from Malaysia currently on the platform, iTalent, has registered interest to join from investors in 73 different countries.
Photo: Malaysian Minister of Finance, Najib Razak and Second Finance Minister Johari Abdul Ghani handing over the award to Fundedbyme Malaysia’s COO, Angelld Quah (Source: Fundedbyme)
The following chart lists the loan originations of p2p lending marketplaces in October. Funding Circle had a record month ahead of Zopa and Ratesetter. Lendinvest has strong results too and Assetz Capital makes a big leap forward. The total volume for the reported marketplaces adds up to 443 million Euro. I track the development of p2p lending volumes for many countries. Since I already have most of the data on file I can publish statistics on the monthly loan originations for selected p2p lending platforms. Thincats crossed the 200M GBP funded this inception milestone.
Table: P2P Lending Volumes in October 2016. 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.
BorsadelCredito.it is the first Italian p2p lending platform. We help creditworthy SMEs to obtain credit in just three working days while promising 5-7% return to our investors. So far, we disbursed loans for 4.3M EUR (as reported on our statistics page) boosting the savings of hundreds of lenders.
In a market context where about five million SME’s are facing strong difficulties in approaching traditional credit channels, P2P lending represents a breath of fresh air for both investors and entrepreneurs.
What are the three main advantages for investors?
For investors, accessing a digital marketplace represents an unprecedented way to obtain strong returns while supporting Italian SME’s. Overall, expected average returns range from 5 to 7% and, thanks to a strong diversification level (funds are divided among hundreds of firms) the risk of losses arising from defaults is strongly contained.
With BorsadelCredito.it our lenders invest in the Real Economy. The digital marketplace is the most efficient and attractive way for credit operations in the Italian enterprise framework: loan fund and SMEs financing opportunities represent one of the easiest investment options in the whole market.
What are the three main advantages for borrowers?
For the applying companies, forwarding a request is very easy: as for the lender, the experience is completely digital and way faster than the traditional credit channels. From BorsadelCredito.it it takes only 5 minutes to complete a loan request: in order to be evaluated, firms must have at least one year of activity, 50.000 EUR stream of gross revenue and no sign of adverse events from Credit Bureaus.
Funding requests are handled by our neuronal algorithms in a few hours and then forwarded to an experienced team of credit analysts, who overlook the firm’s statements and overall performance in 24 hours to send a final response: if the evaluation is positive, credit can be disbursed in just two working days, without the need to open a bank account or provide any guarantees.
What ROI can investors expect?
The ROI our investors can expect is very high and it’s around 5/7%.
Currently the average is 5.71% after bad debts and fees, much higher than what they would earn with the other traditional tools for investments. Last but not least we have a credit protection for our investors payed directly by borrowers.
Is the technical platform self-developed?
Yes, the platform is completely self-developed, as for our valuation models. We invest most of our resources (both in terms of time and money) in the development of efficient processes, workflows and credit scoring models (for example, we are now building a more complex Web-scoring model, which uses big data from the internet to give us a clear overview on how the web sees the evaluated company). Continue reading →
Zopa is the first p2p lending marketplace to run a hackathon called Zopathon. Participants a challenged to code something ‘that makes interest rates more interesting’. I have seen several hackathons in the fintech space but usually they are organized by banks, service providers or accelerators and none were p2p lending specific. Zopa says they will introduce APIs, that can be used in the 24 hour event. Sign up for participants is here.
Today Lending Club has unveiled a new product offer. Borrowers in California will be able to refinance auto loans through Lending Club. Lending Club says that the opportunity is huge with currently more than 1 trillion US$ in auto debt outstanding, while just a fraction of that – 40 billion US$ – refinanced annually. The company states this represents huge potential for both Lending Club’s platform and the millions of Americans who could save by refinancing into a more affordable product. Lending Club estimates the average APR for borrowers on new loans through Lending Club will be about 1-3% lower than their current loan, translating into an average savings of up to 1,350 US$ over the life of the loan.
“Tens of millions of Americans borrow over half a trillion dollars every year to buy cars. The practices and processes of the auto lending industry offer consumers limited options and a lack of transparency. This has created a gap between the rates consumers pay and the rates they might otherwise qualify for, unnecessarily driving up debt burdens,” said Scott Sanborn, Lending Club’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “We are excited to leverage our technology and core capabilities to put thousands of dollars back in consumers’ pockets.”. “This is Lending Club’s first offering of access to a secured loan with an overall risk and return profile that’s complementary to the unsecured loans available through our platform. It’s a big step in the evolution of our platform, a win for consumers, and will give our investors access to another proven asset,” Sanborn said.
Loans will be for amounts from 5K to 50K US$ with terms of 24 to 72 months and APRs ranging from 2.49% to 19.99%.
Lending Club strives to offer a much simpler application process than competitors. While the loans are initially limited to borrowers in California it seems likely that Lending Club will expand that. An article with more details is on Lendacademy.
