Baltic

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania

P2P Lending Site Isepankur Improves Loan Quality

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Estonian p2p lending service isePankur successfully improved the loan quality in 2010. The company added several validation steps for loan applications. On top of the existing credit bureau checks and it’s own scoring model isePankur introduced several manual checks on the borrowers in May and July. Since September borrowers need to submit bank statements which isePankur uses to verify information presented in the loan application. The measures implemented are listed in detail here.

CEO Pärtel Tomberg told P2P-Banking.com: “…  these [new] loans will … be the most profitable social banking loans for investors across the globe”.

To prove this claim Isepankur is publishing real time performance data on its marketplace.


(See Isepankur site for larger size interactive charts)

‘Unlike other companies you can see the quality of loans per month so the growth rate of the portfolio will not hide the actual returns from loans issued previously.‘ says Pärtel Tomberg.

The charts reflect the drastic reduction of bad debt from loans issued after May 2010 and the very positive impact on lender returns. Continue reading →

Fixura Starts P2P Lending in Finland

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A few days ago Finnish p2p lending site Fixura launched. The bilingual (Finnish & Swedish) site already lists over a hundred loan requests.

CEO Simon Sandvik told P2P-Banking.com:

This social lending company differs from the ‘standard’ ones as it does not provide lending auctions. Instead, the borrower sets his/her own interest rate, amount (1, 000 – 10,000 EUR) and duration of the loan. Then a Finnish credit scoring company processes the data and the borrower gets a one-to-five star rating. If a borrower is marked for payment issues in the past, the loan request automatically gets rejected.

… investors can also diversify their investments through different loans in 100 EUR lots. …

The company operates totally free of paper as it uses the local banks’ identification systems, a kind of e-signature. The investors can invest directly online and the borrowers can sign their contracts.

If a loan does not get fully funded the borrower can choose after 14 days from the first investment to accept a part of it, or reject it as he or she sees fit.

Currently investors pay 4 Euro for each withdrawal. Fees for borrowers are

  • 5% origination fee
  • 2% annual fee
  • 4 Euro per transaction

Compared to other p2p lending services these fees are rather high.

P2P Lending Sites in Europe

wiseclerk 3 Comments

Visualizations are great to show data that would otherwise just be a long list. I decided to create a map of the p2p lending landscape in Europe. It shows active and discontinued p2p lending services in Europe (including p2p microfinance). Not listed are sites that are in pre-launch stage. All of these marketplaces have been featured earlier in the P2P-Banking.com blog. If you want more information about any of them just enter the name in the search box on the top right of this blog.

Notice to other websites: You are free to copy and use this map, provided you agree not to alter or resize the image and you will set a link to this article.

Notice to p2p lending sites: If you want to be included in a future version of this map, contact me to learn how.

B2B Loans Introduced at Isepankur

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IsePankur, the Estonian P2P banking site, this recently added three innovations to their platform:

  1. Loan auctions that end immediately when the loan request is 100 percent funded
  2. Business accounts enabling Business-to-Business, Consumer-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer lending and borrowing
  3. An arbitrage court that will be in charge of solving disagreements coming from the loans, incl. defaulting loans

isePankur decided to add a new auction type based on requests from the borrowers that allows the borrower to choose if the auctions ends after a set time period or when its fulfilled 100 per cent. The borrowers currently have an alternative to borrow from banks, pay-day loan companies or isePankur. The two former institutions provide the loan to the customer with-in 1 to 3 days from the application. Hence some of customers asked to implement a system by which they would be able to choose between a quick financing or a low interest rate in order for them to be more willing to use the peer-to-peer platform.

isePankur also launched an important new feature allowing legal entities to register, lend and borrow on the site. The maximum loan amounts (only for companies) have been increased to 150,000 EEK (approx. 13,175 US$), approx 15 times higher than the loan limit for individuals. There were three major reasons for the addition: (a) small companies lack financing opportunities as the banks have stopped providing credit whilst there are no official debt markets in Estonia; (b) companies with excess funds do not have simple investment opportunities that would provide them with returns of over 3-4 per cent per annum; and (c) there is a 0 per cent corporate tax in Estonia hence most of individuals with excess capital keep it in their companies’ accounts. isePankur aims to increase the loan volumes on the site multi-fold after the public and companies have had enough time to get familiar with the benefits provided by the business services.

Continue reading →

Sobralaen renamed Isepankur

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Only 6 weeks after the launch, Estonian p2p lending service Sobralaen.ee was renamed into IsePankur.ee (translates to iBanker). The reasons were that “The previous name only represented one side of the business (borrowing) and [that] it had negative associations with payday loan companies who have destroyed the term ‘loan’ in Estonia over the past 2-3 years”, co-founder Pärtel Tomberg told P2P-Banking.com.

Since the launch 44 loans with a value of 81,200 EEK (approx. 7,000 US$) were founded. The current average interest rate is 25.3% which matches bank interest rates for similar loans.

Following requests by lenders, Isepankur allows borrowers to reveal their identity (full name and personal identity code) in their auctions. Clicking on the name or the identity code runs an automatic query at Google.