conference

Sign Up for Lendit Europe Conference in London in October

wiseclerk 1 Comment

LendIt Europe will be held in London on October 20-21, 2015. LendIt is the major conference for the p2p lending industry with venues in New York, San Francisco, China and London. I attended Lendit London last year and can recommend it to anybody in the p2p lending industry. You can read my Lendit Recap 2014 here.

With the event only 3 months away and registration open you can now grab tickets at earlybird pricing. Earlybird price for the conference is 495 GBP (plus VAT), price will go up to 895 GBP (plus VAT) after July 31st. For my valued blog readers I obtained Lendit discount code wiseclerkvip – enter this voucher code on the payment page and you get a special 15% discount on the ticket price.

LendIt Europe will bring together the leaders and pioneers at the forefront of the p2p and online lending industry in Europe. In addition to the leading lending platforms, LendIt Europe is expected to draw institutional investors, financial analysts, private wealth managers, family offices, individual investors, and media representatives from across the globe.

LendIt Europe 2015 will be a two day event with the second day in partnership with the UK P2P Finance Association (P2PFA). Agenda, speakers, and sponsors will be announced in the coming weeks.

The conference at the Hilton Metropole Hotel will feature keynotes from the CEOs of the leading UK platforms, as well as interactive panel sessions with leaders from across Europe. There will also be a pre-conference cocktail party held the night before at the Landmark Hotel.

I am looking forward to LendIt London and hope to see you all there! For those of you who can’t make it – the event will be broadcasted live on the internet.

Lendit Europe 2015

Report from the Symvest Conference in Prague

wiseclerk 1 Comment

Last Thursday I attended the Symvest conference ‘P2P Lending – the New Frontier in Finance‘ in Prague, which was organised by Michael Sonenshine of Symfonie Capital in cooperation with the university of Economics, Prague. Speakers and panelists were mainly from Eastern Europe, though some made the trip from UK, Austria and Italy. The audience consisted predominantly of representatives of Czech finance (banks, investment companies) and students. A main motivation for the conference was to create awareness for p2p lending in general, which is a new phenomenon in the Czech Republic. Sonenshine announced his plans to launch SymCredit, a p2p lending marketplace catering to SMEs in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Matching the audiences experiences some of the content presented was introductory, like ‘What is p2p lending?‘, ‘What are the risks?‘ and a recap of what happened abroad in the past years of development in p2p lending. Regulation was also discussed. Sam Ridler of the P2PFA gave an overview on the UK situation and Danica Sebestová of Squire Patton Boggs did a very informative presentation on what the applicable legal environment is in the Czech Republic. Actually the hurdles for launching a p2p lending marketplace there are rather low – there is no specific regulation for p2p lending. While some applicable laws are to be obeyed, summed up it amounts to registering to start trading – at least as long as the loan volume originated is lower than 3 million Euro in the last 12 month.

Speakers pointed out that a hurdle to establish p2p lending is that Czechs are very conservative investors. Backing it up with figures, they explained that Czechs prefer to deposit their money in short term deposits at banks yielding only about 0.15% interest or invest into real estate rather than to look for higher yield investments.

The best part of attending conferences for me is the ability to network with so many people working in p2p lending in one place. I had lunch with Jevgenijs Kazanins, Chief Marketing Officer of Bondora. He wouldn’t disclose which markets Bondora will be entering next. Discussing investor wishes around the new portfolio manager, which does limit selection choices, he said that in Bondora’s view the new API will address this, as it will allow many parameters for selection. He would not disclose when the new API will be available.

I also had a long talk with Siim Maivel, CEO of Investly. He has interesting plans for new offerings. As soon as those are launched, I will write about them here in the blog. With David Bradley-Ward, CEO of Ablrate, I chatted about the scondary market and the loan pipeline. The secondary market will be completely overhauled and the new version launched in April. A small anecdote: He mentioned that it is not uncommon that 200,000 pounds would be spend on legal costs and due diligence of one of the aircraft loans on the platform. He therefore thinks it is porbably safe to call it the most extensive vetting of all p2p lending platforms.

With Martins Sulte I catched up on the last happenings around Mintos. He assured me that he does not expect the talks with the consumer protection body to have any impact on operations. I asked him for the reason for the high interest rates of the Mintos loans, after all these are secured loans. He explained that the Latvian banks are not interested in small loans (<50,000 Euro) backed by real estate, as for them the costs associated with the process are too high. Mintos is receiving many loan applications and so far approve only 3 to 5% of them. Sulte has expansion plans, both in product offering (moving into other secured loan types) and geographically (moving into more markets with Estonia being the next).

Concluding I would like to express my thanks to the organizers for this free to attend conference. It was well organized – they even had simulteneous interpreters translating every panel from Englisch into Czech language.

 

Lendit Europe Recap

wiseclerk 1 Comment

I just returned from the Lendit Europe conference in London. It was a great occasion to meet so many of the people that developed p2p lending to the current state and hear what they have to say about the future.

The entire industry is enthusiastic as all figures report fast growth which will be further boosted by the tax incentives (NISA) coming for retail lenders in the UK . Cormac Leech, analyst at Liberum, projected that interest rates (and yields for investors) will in effect slightly rise for the UK platforms while they might slightly sink on Prosper and Lending Club. Others do wonder if the UK services will manage to scale loan demand fast enough to match the expected retail investor money looking to invest through the new ISA.


Impressions from Lendit Europe (photo used with permission)

There were multiple examples that marketplace lending is achieving broader and broader reach, both in terms of countries served (e.g. Ovamba, the p2p lending platform operating in Cameroon that GLI Finance invested into) as well as specific markets served (e.g. more and more property investing or Bitbond tackling Bitcoin based p2p lending).


Impressions from Lendit Europe (photo used with permission)

I did not watch all the panels and presentations in the main conference room (the keynote presentation slides are online here; the videos will be made available on the Lendit site in the a few weeks) as I spent much time to meet up with people that I previously only knew from email or phone conversations.

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Lendit Conference comes to Europe in November

wiseclerk

LendIt Europe will be held in London on November 17th, 2014. LendIt is the major conference for the p2p lending industry. I was not able to attend the event when it took place in the US in the past year, but I will certainly fly to London in November. The San Francisco event last autumn was attended by over 950 people.

LendIt Europe will be held at 155 Bishopsgate, a state of the art new conference venue in the heart of London’s financial district.

Registration is now open (use discount code wiseclerkvip on the payment page and you get a special 15% discount on the ticket price, which I obtained for readers of P2P-Banking.com). Earlybird price will end on Aug. 31st.

LendIt Europe will bring together the leaders and pioneers at the forefront of the p2p and online lending industry in Europe. In addition to the leading lending platforms, LendIt Europe is expected to draw institutional investors, financial analysts, private wealth managers, family offices, individual investors, and media representatives from across the globe. Agenda, speakers, and sponsors will be announced in the coming weeks.

“Europe is the birthplace of p2p lending and in many ways, it leads the world,” said Peter Renton, Co-Founder of LendIt and Founder of Lend Academy. “For this reason, we decided to create a European version of our popular LendIt Conference to bring the European leaders in our industry together so we can learn from each other.”

The one-day conference will feature keynotes from the CEOs of the leading UK platforms, as well as interactive panel sessions with leaders from across Europe. The Exhibit Hall will feature both new and established platforms as well as service providers, allowing attendees to get a complete snapshot of the industry. There will also be a pre-conference cocktail party held the night before at the Andaz Hotel on Liverpool Street.