Process

New Lendy Cashback Offer 50 GBP for New Customers

wiseclerk

Lendy logoFor investors, that considered using the Lendy platform, but have not yet signed up, now may be a very good time to do so, as Lendy is offering 50 GBP cashback to investors that invest at least 1,000 GBP on the condition that this amount stays invested for at least 3 month. Lendy lists bidge loans secured by commercial property. The interest rates are typically in the range of 7% to 12% and the loan duration is typically 3 to 12 months. Currently a lot of loans are offered on Lendy’s secondary market, which will allow easy diversification into several loans upon signup.

I have been investing on Lendy for 2.5 years now (when I started it was still called Saving Stream) and I reviewed my Lendy portfolio only last month on the blog.

Lendy is open to international investors. While a UK account is not mandatory, I suggest opening a UK bank account online via Transferwise – this will make things easier, if multiple UK marketplaces are used (my article on Transferwise Borderless account).

To get the cashback, just register at Lendy via this link and start investing.

See more p2p lending cashback offers and subscribe to be notified when new cashback offers are listed.

UK App Pariti Sells Zopa Loans

wiseclerk

UK app Pariti has integrated loan offers by p2p lending marketplace Zopa into its app allowing users to check whether they could get a better rate for their debt. User can apply for a debt consolidation loan directly from the app. Pariti is using Zopa’s API to access data for the offers.

The Pariti app, which claims 70,000 users, connects to a user’s existing bank accounts, analyses their spending history, and helps them set a target for improvement.

The Zopa integration enables Pariti users to discover if they could be paying less for their debt without affecting their credit score, and to apply directly for a consolidation loan through the Pariti app.

“UK consumers are getting ripped off by credit card companies”, Pariti founder Matt Ford comments. “Introductory offers, confusing fees, and unsuitable products have meant that people are paying far too much to borrow, and are getting stuck in high-cost debt. The product integration with Zopa allows us to proactively help reduce their cost of borrowing and pay off debt faster.”.

Zopa’s CEO, Jaidev Janardana, says: “The API is already being used in online retail, and the implementation of our Pariti partnership marks its first use in a fully integrated, in-app application process. He added: “Our own research shows that many consumers could save money by swapping out expensive credit card debt for a lower-priced Zopa loan, and by working with Pariti we are able to offer this service to even more consumers.”

Friday Fun: Bondora’s Personalized Investment Video

wiseclerk

Just before the weekend Bondora sent me an email with a personalized investment overview video (click here to see mine; I was not able to embed it directly here in the blog). The video page encourages sharing via social media (Google, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter), so obviously an aim is to aid in investor marketing. In future I might need to spend less effort on my personal portfolio reviews and post the video instead (just kidding). The highlighted return figure is higher than my own calculations, but I did achieve a high return on Bondora over the past years.

Have you seen other attempts on viral marketing via investors by p2p lending marketplaces? Let me know in the comments, please.

EDIT: Succeeded in embedding the video now:

A Look At My Current Bondora Portfolio

wiseclerk 3 Comments

In October 2012 I started to invest into p2p lending at Bondora. I periodically blog about my experiences – you can read my update from Dec. 2015 here. Over the total time I did deposit 14,000 Euro and withdrew 13,380 Euro.  So as you see I cashed out an amount almost equal to the amounts I deposited. The good news is that I still own 705 loan parts with an outstanding principal of 10,362 Euro at an average interest rate of 23.74%. Of these 6,355 Euro are in current loans, 1,004 Euro in overdue loans and 3,003 Euro in 60+ days overdue loans. The reason that I still have such a large loan book despite cashing out nearly as much as I paid in, is that I reinvested nearly all interest and principal repayments from 2012 till 2015.

Bondora shows a net return of 24.6% for my portfolio. 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 17.0% return.

Let’s look how my remaining portfolio is distributed by several criteria

Bondora portfolio by country

Chart 1: My portfolio by country

Bondora Portfolio by rating

Chart 2: My portfolio by rating

Bondora portfolio ditribution by loan purpose

Chart 3: My portfolio by loan purpose

Recent developments

A lot has changed in the past four months. With the introduction of new regulation in Estonia, Bondora now prefunds all loans and also keeps a stake in the loans (‘skin in the game‘). Manual bidding on loans is not as straightforward as previously because now investors can make bids, which are not binding until allocation happens. This leads to situations were say 155% of the loan amount has been bid for, but the allocation has not happened yet, because some of the bidding investors have not enough cash in their account to match their bids and those bids that are sufficiently funded don’t add up to 100%. Furthermore Bondora gives bid preference to bids with larger amounts. If at allocation time bids with enough cash add up to more than 100%, then the bids for higher amounts will succeed, while the smaller amount bids will be rejected.

Continue reading →

Marketplaces Step Up Incentives for Investors

wiseclerk

Currently there is an increase of promotions by p2p lending marketplaces in order to acquire and activate retail investors. Cashback offers are more frequent and Funding Circle is giving away iPads to investors that will invest at least 20,000 GBP during the Funding Circle spring promotion. Investors welcome these added benefits, but for marketplaces it is a fine line to walk. They want to grow originations, but risk that investors will expect getting extras and might hold back further investments until the next offer is made.

Funding Circle Spring Promotion
(Image source: Funding Circle)

Google Advertising Lending Club Loans

wiseclerk

I have written about the partnership between Google and Lending Club earlier. The image below shows an actual advertising message Google is sending to its Adwords customers. Note that a special loan is offered, not a standard Lending Club loan. This partnership is a great match for both Google and Lending Club. Google can enable its customers to get access to the funds they need to grow their business and potentially spend more on advertising services supplied by Google. Lending Club can target selected businesses, which were prescreened based on the data Google has via the Adwords customer relationship.

google-lendingclub
Image source: Business2community.com