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Crowdfunding and P2P Lending in Switzerland – Market Overview

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Prof. Dr. Andreas Dietrich of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Simon Amrein, Reto Wernli and Dr. Falk Kohlmann have published the study ‘Crowdfunding Monitoring Switzerland 2015‘. It analyses the development of crowdfunding in Switzerland giving special attention to the development of p2p lending.

The Swiss market is growing fast; albeit on low absolute numbers compared to other European countries. The market is in a very early development stage. As the following chart shows the volume is mainly generated by crowdsupporting/crowddonating.

Crowdfunding Market Switzerland 2014
Source: Crowdfunding Monitoring Switzerland 2015 study

The total market for new loans to consumers in Switzerland in 2014 was 3.9 billion CHF. Via p2p lending 3.5 million CHF were originated in 2014, so that equals a market share of only 0.1%. But the p2p lending volume has nearly doubled compared to 2013 (1.8 million CHF). The authors state:

The crowdlending market has experienced the strongest year-on-year growth of all crowdfunding segments. … The number of campaigns rose from 116 to 214, and all of them were successfully funded. The current challenge of crowdlending platforms is not finding funders. On the contrary, it is (more) difficult to get borrowers on the platforms. Crowdlending campaign funders invested an average of CHF 1,100, which is substantially different from the figures in reward-based crowdfunding & crowddonating as well as in crowdinvesting. The average campaign amount was CHF 16,200, which was slightly higher than in the past year (CHF 15,000). The average loan amount in crowdlending is very similar to the average consumer loan as of the end of 2014. The crowdlending market is, however, still niche market.

Crowdfunding Market Switzerland Growth
Source: Crowdfunding Monitoring Switzerland 2015 study

Regulation limits that a private consumer loan cannot be financed by more than 20 different individual lenders.

The authors analysed loan data of the Cashare marketplace. Examining who uses p2p lending as a borrower the study finds:

The average borrower age is 38. One fifth had at least one child under the age of 16 at the time the loan was raised. At 37 percent, married people were proportionally under-represented, although they make up 54 percent of the permanent resident population. 19 Homeowners (19 percent) and women (24 percent) are also under-represented. The distribution of nationalities is slightly more representative of the Swiss population. 71 percent of the borrowers were Swiss, while 29 percent of the borrowers were not in possession of a Swiss passport. The average proportion of the foreign-born resident population in Switzerland was 22 percent between 2008 and 2013.
The age distribution of the borrowers leads to the conclusion that crowdlending is currently still primarily used by the tech-savvy Generation Y. 60 percent of all loans raised since 2008 went to people under the age of 40. Only 4 percent of the borrowers for successful projects were over 60 years of age.

Also the borrowers regional distribution shows that use is much more common in the German speaking areas of Switzerland.

Regional distribution of p2p lending borrowers in Switzerland
Source: Crowdfunding Monitoring Switzerland 2015 study

Continue reading →

How I Explored P2P Lending – My Review Part II

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This is part II of a guest post by British investor ‘GSV3Miac’. Read part I first.

Most of my concerns about P2P lending revolve around its relative immaturity. Even ZOPA, the oldest in the UK, has only been around 10 year or so, and have changed ‘just about everything’ at least twice. Funding Circle (“FC”)have 3-4 years history, but there have been no two years where the business has actually been stable (maximum loan sizes, loan terms, Institutional participation, etc. have all changed pretty much continually over the period I’ve been investing). How well the companies, and their borrowers, would survive a real recession, can only be guessed at.

What do I actually invest in? Well practically anything if the rate looks good. My ‘core holding’ is in RS, but there is nearly as much spread across the P2B platforms. For extra P2P related risk (and maybe reward) I also signed up to invest in the Assetz and Commuter Club capital raises (via SEEDRS). With EIS investments some of the money at risk is renated tax, which you had a 100% certainty of losing to the government anyway.

I do not plan to hold most of my investments (particularly in FC) for the full 5 years. After a few months the financial data is well out of date (much of it is already out of date when the loan is approved!) and unless you want to spend time checking how the company is doing, it is easier to sell the loans on and start anew.

Similarly if rates start to move dramatically, it’s time to ‘flip’ or ‘churn’ .. selling a 7% loan part when rates move to 9% is possible, but might sting a bit. Selling a 7% loan part when rates have moved to 14% is going to hurt a lot, or might be completely impossible. If rates move the other way, selling a 7% loan part when average rates are 6% is not only easy, it may be profitable (assuming the platform allows marking up). You might wind up with un-invested funds, but as someone succinctly put it on the P2P forum, ‘un-invested is a lot less painful than lost’.

The future looks equally interesting .. we are promised P2P investments within an ISA (do NOT hold your breath, this seems to be moving at a glacial pace so far), which could result in a ‘wall of money’ arriving on the scene. We are promised P2P losses to be tax deductible (against income, rather than capital gains), which has an impact on the worth of a protection fund. We will inevitably see some new entrants appear as the P2P area grows and become more attractive (Hargreaves Lansdown, a very large fund management player, has already indicated they might get involved, I believe). We will equally inevitably see some more of the current players merge or vanish, and many of the loans default.

As I may have mentioned a couple of times, nothing has been very stable so far .. most of the platforms are still ‘feeling their way’ with immature software (this is polite-speak for ‘bugs’), and business models/systems which are still evolving. The basic P2P premise of connecting people with money with people who want it, without too much activity in the middle, does not appear to scale too well when the number of each side get big (a million people bidding to fund a thousand loans each day is not something to contemplate lightly). Platforms need to grow to survive and they need to grow in balance – if they double the number of lenders, they need twice as many willing borrowers, and vice versa .. Asymmetrical growth just annoys whoever is on the surplus side, distorts the rates, and results in no growth at all – you need both a lender and a borrower to have any business. It is obvious, but very hard to manage. Continue reading →

How I Explored P2P Lending – My Review Part I

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This is part I of a guest post by British investor ‘GSV3Miac’.

About the author.. I spent 25 or so years in software engineering, programming everything from IBM mainframes to microchips in early Hotpoint washing machines. I must have been halfway competent (or not) since I wound up managing a software development group, a large IBM computer centre, workstations of networks and PCs. When my (American owned) factory shut down I spent the last year (in between managing the closure) retraining as an IFA. I qualified, but I never actually practised – I took my redundancy / pension and headed for the hills (of Shropshire). That was a while ago, so don’t expect me to know chapter and verse on the latest tax wrinkles! *grin*

How did I get into P2P (misnamed .. it’s largely P2B these days .. much of is headed for B2B!) lending? Blame my mother .. she died, and left me a sum of money which was not expected, and not really critical to my future. Having no children (there being, IMO, no people shortage on the planet) it is probably all headed for charities one day, so I thought I might as well have some fun with it. Before I did that, I had, of course, gone through the approved checklist .. i.e.

‘Emergency’ easy access cash account(s) .. tick.

Pay off the mortgage .. tick.

ISA(s) .. tick

Pension Provisions .. tick

Stock market investments / bonds / shares / funds ..tick

OK, anything left can be risked a bit. (I accept that stocks and shares and even cash has =some= risk attached, but now we are looking at ‘high wire with no net’ type options .. VCTs, EIS schemes, and yep .. P2P lending). If you want to plan for ultimate disaster (Ebola pandemic, nuclear war and global financial meltdown) then probably investing in long dated canned food, and an underground shelter on an island upwind from everywhere, is your best bet. More modest (and likely) risks can be mitigated by spreading your investments around a lot, and by being conservative in your assumptions of what you might get back.

I started my P2P journey (in 2013) with Funding Circle (henceforth ‘FC’) and ZOPA, both of which I had heard about from a friend, and I dipped my toes in rather gingerly at first. ZOPA had been going for some time, and I probably missed their best years (when you could decide who to lend to, and later when you could at least still decide at what rate you’d lend). ZOPA had just introduced their ‘safeguarded’ lending, and started fixing the rates, so even their name (‘Zone Of Possible Agreement’) no longer made sense. I stopped lending with them after less than 6 months .. the rates were just not attractive (and unpredictably so). On the plus side, the exit from ZOPA was fairly cheap and painless.

As an alternative to ZOPA I went to look at Ratesetter (RS), which still lets you set the rate(s) you are willing to lend at over 1,3 or 5 years (or monthly). No control over who gets it, but at least some control over what they pay; and (like modern ZOPA) there is a provision fund which should hopefully protect you from bad debts. Exit from RS can be quite expensive though, so best to lend for no longer than you are sure you can do without the money for. Basically they charge you the difference between the rate you would have got for the actual period you lent for, and the rate you got by lending for a longer period. I still like them, for simplicity with just enough control to make it interesting, and I lend / recycle in the 3 and 5 year markets depending on the rates at the time (typically I expect at least an extra 1% for signing up for the extra 2 years). Continue reading →

How I Selected My Preferred P2P Lending Marketplaces – Part I

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This is part I of a guest post by British investor ‘Pete’.

Perhaps an introduction is the best way of starting this blog post since it should explain my reasons and approach to Peer to Peer (P2P) and Peer to Business (P2B) lending.

I am a UK based independent professional engineer. An engineer in my discipline requires a love of detail, data and spreadsheets and being independent it is required that I run my own company so I understand basic accounting and number/data manipulation.

So why do I invest in P2P and P2B? In the past I have had Pension funds raided, Investment funds loosing capital due to stock market losses and fees, a mortgage endowment policy returning 1.9% over 25 years when a simple cash investment returned +9%, shares devalued by the UK government who then bought them out at the devalued rate … a long list of ‘professionally’ managed schemes that lost my money. With P2P and P2B I am in control, I either sink or swim based on my decisions.

I started lending at the start of 2012 with Zopa and to a lesser degree with Ratesetter but not before I had read as much as I could find regarding P2P and the various business models. Using on-line resources research into Company and Directors ‘histories’ followed, a process I continue to use before I start investing with a new platform. Risk and Taxation were the next topics I looked into.

Whilst projected default rates were available on  Zopa I took a pessimistic view and anticipated a higher rate of loss when I put together my first spreadsheet to log my transactions and real rate of return (I mainly use Excel with the XIRR function). My aim with Zopa was to diversify as quickly as possible so I quickly put together a large number of small loans whilst ensuring that I didn’t have ‘dead money’ waiting to be lent out. This strategy worked and my losses have so far turned out to be below the Zopa projected level. In recent years Zopa have changed the way monies are lent out and introduced a provision fund to cover bad debts (Ratesetter have always had a fund) and at the same time investors rates dropped (Zopa dictated the rate at which money was lent) so I decided with regret that Zopa was no longer for me and started to withdraw monies as they became available, a process that will continue for some years since I am still happy with the return from my remaining loans.

In the meantime my Ratesetter account quietly built up (the power of compounding interest) and I had started investing in Funding Circle (Sept 2012). I quickly found out that due diligence was required when investing in listed loans (I do not like automatic bidders, I will always manually invest/re-invest) and whilst time consuming it gives some reassurance that you are not investing blind. Whilst the returns I received (and still receive) from Funding Circle are above those I receive from Zopa and Ratesetter I have found the time taken checking companies can be disproportionate to the return if small loans are made. In spite of due diligence the defaults in my experience are higher and coupled with the current UK taxation system for individuals, defaults can hit your rate of return in a disproportionate way.*

It is for these reasons that I have in the last year started withdrawing cash from Funding Circle in the same manner I am taking with Zopa. In the meantime my Ratesetter account continued to build. Continue reading →

Lending Club and Citi Team Up on Community Lending

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Lending Club Lending Club Logoand Citi are launching a pioneering new partnership with Varadero Capital L.P., an alternative management firm focused on specialized credit investments, to facilitate up to 150 million US$ in loans designed to provide more affordable credit to underserved borrowers and communities.

Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club, said, “Many banks across the country are looking for opportunities to enhance their community lending efforts for low- and moderate-income families. We’re excited to expand the use of the Lending Club platform to make this process easier for Citi and other banks, and help lower the cost of credit for borrowers.”

“It is important that we help increase access to financing alternatives for American families,” said John Heppolette, Co-Head and Managing Director of Citi Community Capital at Citi. “This partnership is a direct response to that need and will help provide a viable source of responsible credit. We are proud to be part of this initiative.”

Citi Community Capital is the group within Citi that focuses on providing community development loans and investments that help meet the credit needs of communities and which receive consideration under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Continue reading →

Credit Suisse NEXT Investors Leads 165M US$ Investment Round in Prosper Marketplace

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Prosper Marketplace, Prosper Logowhich operates a privately held p2p lending marketplace, today announced a 165 million US$ Series D financing, led by Credit Suisse NEXT Investors, part of Credit Suisse Asset Management. Additional participants included J.P. Morgan Asset Management, SunTrust Banks, a subsidiary of USAA, BBVA Ventures (BBVA’s representative office in San Francisco), Neuberger Berman Private Equity Funds, Passport Capital, Breyer Capital, and others. The latest funding will support the company’s continued growth, expansion, and development of a national brand as it builds new products and services for the marketplace’s borrowers and investors. This round put the valuation of the company at roughly 1.87 billion US$.

The funding comes on the heels of a record quarter, with nearly 600 million US$ in loans originated through the Prosper platform, up 200% from the year ago quarter. The significant growth is a true indication of the increasing mainstream acceptance of marketplace lending.

“This investment is a testament to the efforts of our entire team in changing how people experience access to credit,” said Aaron Vermut, chief executive officer at Prosper Marketplace. “The explosion of interest in P2P lending demonstrates that a shift is in progress in the way that consumers borrow and lend. This new funding will help us scale the business to meet this growing awareness and demand.” Continue reading →