growth

Kiva Loans Surpass 100,000,000 USD

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Congratulations to Kiva. They have tackled another impressive milestone: more then 100 million US$ total loans funded since inception. And the growth curve is pointing straight upwards. 60 million US$ were funded in the last 12 months.

Quoting today’s numbers from Kiva’s statistics page:

Total value of all loans made through Kiva:$100,223,910
Number of Kiva Lenders:585,070
Number of countries represented by Kiva Lenders:185
Number of entrepreneurs that have received a loan through Kiva:249,619
Number of loans that have been funded through Kiva:142,801
Percentage of Kiva loans which have been made to women entrepreneurs:82.72%
Number of Kiva Field Partners (microfinance institutions Kiva partners with):106
Number of countries Kiva Field Partners are located in:49
Current repayment rate (all partners):97.88%
Average loan size (This is the average amount loaned to an individual Kiva Entrepreneur. Some loans – group loans – are divided between a group of borrowers.):$404.87
Average total amount loaned per Kiva Lender (includes reloaned funds):$171.34
Average number of loans per Kiva Lender:4.91

Will Kiva run out of goals now? Definitly not:

But we believe this is only the beginning . . .

Kiva is about dreaming big. The entrepreneurs on the website dream about big business; our Field Partners dream about financially including all of the poor; Kiva Lenders dream about ending poverty.

Kiva was a big dream before the idea of lending to someone on the other side of the world became a reality. Now we have big dreams about making Kiva the world’s hub for alleviating poverty.

This is a quote from a Kiva blogpost from October, which also give the strategic goals for the next 5 years:

  1. Raise 1,000 million US$ in loans over the internet
  2. Reach 2 million entrepreneurs around the world
  3. Realize our own self-sufficiency in the process.

Kiva has my support. Let me know, if I can do anything to win your support for Kiva.

Moneyauction – Booming P2P Lending Service in Korea

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Moneyauction, a Korean p2p lending company, says it is “the No. 2 [website] in Korea’s non-bank area, but the number 1 website in the finance area”. And it has impressive figures to prove it. Between June 01th, 2007 and Sep. 15th the loan amount applied was 56.6 million US$.

Moneyauction partnered with telecommunication carrier Korea Telecom and offers a mobile service allowing borrowers to apply for and lenders to bid on loans via their cell phone.

In 3 months Moneyauction plans to launch a secondary market (called ‘Divided bond trading’). A spokesman told P2P-Banking.com that he expects this new feature to boost the transaction volume.

(Source: company management)

P2P Lending Companies Show Strong Growth – Aug. 09

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P2P lending services continue to grow. In some markets the speed of growth has even accelerated.

P2P-Banking.com has created the following overview table listing services in operation and ranked them by loan volume funded in the past 6 months.

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Source: P2P-Banking.com

For some service like the Korean Moneyauction and Popfunding no figures were available. Also omitted are some services that did not reply to information requests.

Note that Prosper.com was closed for most of the observed time span and did not make the minimum cutoff for the table. Also note that Zopa Italy is currently closed.

For a table listing more p2p lending companies check previous ‘P2P Lending Companies by Loan Volume – Jan. 09‘.

Especially british Zopa and the German services show strong growth lately. Smava nearly doubled loan volume in July compared to June (chart), whereas Auxmoney tripled it (chart). At Smava currently even 25,000 Euro loans (approx. 35,750 US$) are funded with bids in only 4 minutes (!) bidding time (example loan).

On the other hand MYC4‘s growth slowed in the last months (chart) due to problems with the providers loan picks.

Smava Funds More Than 1M Euro Loans in June

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P2p lending site Smava.de for the first time reached more than 1 million Euro (approx. 1.4 million US$) loan volume funded in one month. One factor contributing to this is that Smava is in the top 10 rankings for German Google search results for the keywords kredit (engl. loan) and kredite (engl. loans) since the end of May. I find it interesting that there is not one single bank site in the top ten for these search results.

Furthermore Smava profited form TV exposure, which also helped its competitor Auxmoney to achieve a record month with approx. 130,000 Euro loan volume.

In international comparison by p2p lending loan volume funded per month, Smava is in the top 5 behind Virgin Money, Kiva, Zopa UK and Lending Club.


(Source: Smava p2p lending stats; A-H are credit grades)

2nd birthday of Smava

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German p2p lending service Smava.de launched two year ago. Since the launch of Smava 1350 loans were funded for a total loan volume of about 7.9 million Euro (approx. 10.7 million US$).

Lender’s viewpoint

So far lenders on Smava did well. There are approx. 2500 lenders active on Smava. Despite the credit crisis, 99% of the lenders earned a profit in 2008 (total 210,861 Euro), while the 1% who did incur a loss, lost only 60 Euro.

So far ROI in the range from 5-10% have been realistic. As of today 75 loans have defaulted, which is (in percent) more then was originally predicted. The Anleger-Pool mechanism spreads the losses of a default across all loans of a credit grade, which prevents total losses of investments. Therefore when 3 in 100 loans in credit grade X default, the lenders invested in the defaulted loans still receive 97% of the principal, while for lenders in the current loans returns are lowered by 3%.

Technically and on the process level Smava functions as promised.

Borrower’s viewpoint

Provided the borrower has a credit grade of at least ‘H’ (95% of the German population have credit grades between ‘A’ and ‘H’ so about 5% are excluded) and he has a sufficient income, chances for obtaining a loan through Smava are good. About 60 percent of the listings were funded. In February 2009 Smava raised the fees for borrowers from 1% to 2-2.5%.

Marketplace development

Smava shows continuous growth, with the volume of new loans per month approaching 1 million Euro (see chart)


(Source: smava loan stats, Wiseclerk.com, 03-26-09)

Despite extensive and positive press coverage Smava is still a niche market with less than 5000 active users. Looking at the distribution of lenders by amount invested, the top 50 Smava lenders funded about 1,690,000 Euro (or about 21% of total loan volume). Currently lenders are limited to a maximum of 100,000 Euro investment.


(Development of Smava average nominal interest rates for new loans; Source: smava loan statistic, Wiseclerk.com, 03-21-08)

I would estimate that the increased fees allow Smava to cover the variable costs. But to cover fixed operating expenses Smava needs to multiple its volume. First priority of Smava must be to accelerate growth.