MyC4

MyC4 cancels 200,000 Euro pending Ivory Coast loans

wiseclerk 2 Comments

Myc4 logoMyC4 will cancel 105 open and pending loans to borrowers in Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire). This is scheduled to take place next week. Money from the bids will be returned to the lenders. Some lenders are unsatisfied with the situation as the bids in these loans tied up their money for up to 6 weeks without interest.

Announcement from MyC4:

Notre Nation and Ivoire Credit have decided to cancel all open loans currently pending on the MyC4 platform. This is being done for two reasons.  First, both Ivoire Credit and Notre Nation are undergoing significant reorganization and operational changes, to plan for improvements and scaling of operations.  This is putting significant pressure on both organizations and we expect that there might be delay in some payments going forward. Second, there has been a relatively long period since many of these Businesses were uploaded, and the current expected loan disbursement dates. To ensure that the borrowers’ situations have not change would require a new due diligence of each, which current resources don’t allow, given the long list of loans.  Therefore and to protect Investors MYC4 has agreed to return all funds to Investors. This will be done within the next week. If you have money tied up in a Bid to any of these Providers your money will be transferred back into your Account immediately, when the cancellation is done of your specific loan. MYC4 is planning to cancel 105 loans.

MYC4 resume uploading of Businesses from Notre Nation and Ivoire Credit within the coming months, and they will continue to diligently manage the existing portfolio in the interim. If you have more questions please use the Blogs of Notre Nation and Ivoire Credit. We are sorry that your money has been inactive for 4-5 weeks and we apologize.

Source

7.9% ROI on my MyC4 loans in the past year

wiseclerk

MyC4About a year ago I started lending money to African entrepreneurs via MyC4.com.  So far it did meet my expectations. The process of uploading money worked without problems, there were always enough loan applications to select from and the offered interest rates were high enough to allow for good returns despite the risks. The only point, where the usability need to be vastly improved is a better status overview for the payment status of all loans in the portfolio. MyC4 does show the payment status in detail for each loan, but its hard to get an aggregate overview.

I invested at 13.8% average nominal interest rate. 194 loans are currently running, 29 are repaid in full, 12 are open/pending (not yet disbursed), 1 defaulted and 4 were cancelled.

To roughly calculate estimate my ROI I looked at my account display at MyC4

MyC4

About 12-13 months ago I uploaded 1,506.94 Euro. Now my account value is 1,625.24 Euro (9,09 Euro available + 124,62 Euro pending bids + 1.491,93 Euro Outstanding principal). That results in an ROI of 7.9% so far. Naturally it would drop, if the outstanding principal is not repaid in full due to defaults.

The ROI is much lower then the average interest rate, since it does take weeks before an investment in a loan becomes active – and unlend money does not yield interest. A further point is that several late loans affect the ROI.

Read all MyC4 posts from the past months.

MyC4 starts offering loans in Rwanda next week

wiseclerk 5 Comments

MyC4.com will start to offer loans in Rwanda next week. This is the fourth country MyC4 is lending at, after Uganda, Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire. Mads Kjaer, CEO of MyC4, is quoted that Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal and South Africa will follow. In 2009 he aims to serve borrowers in 20 countries in Africa. (Source)

In a danish television video (15 min, danish language), which was broadcastes yesterday, MyC4 is presented as a good alternative for investing and gains a recommendation of MyBanker.dk, a website comparing banks.

Checking on MyC4 late loans

wiseclerk 1 Comment

Lenders at MyC4.com do not have an easy task, when trying to check which of their loans are late on the repayments. The account page does not offer a comprehensive overview page. If a lender really wanted to check in detail he has to click through to the detail page of each loan he invested into.

Officially only one loan has the status ‘defaulted’ so far. However MyC4 so far has no standard policy when a late loan is to be declared defaulted. MyC4 has stated that there will be a default policy by the end of August.

Researching the situation, there are more than 320 loans that are late (fully or partly) with at least one repayment. Of these 72 loans are 3 payments late, 64 loans are 4 payments late, 30 are 5 payments late and 22 are 6 or more payments late.

Another issue that raised some concerns are the first impacts of the changed rules regarding currency risks.

… as some of you might have noticed already the first repayments are now posted on the investors accounts from Kenian investments where we investors are now taking the risk of currency fluctuations.

Within the first period from disbursement to the first repayment the KES has devalued from 97 to 104.5 = 7.2% already. … (Source: see discussion here)

To help lenders selecting loans to invest in, a column with the information whether a loan open for bidding is issued in local currency or in Euro was added to the wiseclerk MyC4 statistic pages.

(Source: uses information from Status der … MyC4 Kredite)

MyC4 with accounting troubles

wiseclerk

Since the new release, MyC4.com has encoutered repeated accounting problems, sometimes with wrong interest calculations, sometimes requiring correction of user account balances. 

Examples of incidents: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

MyC4's staff has been quick to respond to the problems and usually is fixing them fast.
But I believe the issue here is, that p2p lending through a foreign internet startup requires a great amount of trust. And while lenders are used to bugs in new internet application, they do expect a high standard when it comes to accounting. After all no user of online banking would accept that he has to check the interest calculations made by the bank. 

The MyC4 team did a good job developing the platform so far and earned at lot of trust; but if the problems persists this might be an obstacle to further growth. 

Status of my MyC4 loans

wiseclerk

I have lend money in over 170 loans on MyC4.com. My average interest rate is 13.8%. There are no defaults yet (not only in my portfolio, but overall). But lately there are several loans that are late (usually up to one month).

In the account balance late loans are recorded as repayments with zero value:

Latest borrower who went late is Sarah Akany, who runs a computer training and internet center in Uganda. I don't really worry, since she went late once before and caught up again.

The provider (CMC) posted the following notice to lenders on the blog:

Dear investors,

We have contacted the client and she has promised to clear the late payment. We shall continue tracking the client and ensure payment.
Thanks.