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Decision Trees – Using The Available Data to Identify Lending Opportunities on Bondora – Part 1

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This is a guest post by British Bondora investor ‘ParisinGOC’.

Introduction

Financial institutions across the world have many ways of assessing whether a loan is worth making.  A simple search on the web reveals that many use Data Mining.  More specifically, “Decision Trees” are a particular tool within Data Mining that has been analysed and I quickly found at least 2 papers (Mining Interesting Rules in Bank Loans Data and Assessing Loan Risks: A Data Mining Case Study) amongst many pointing in this direction.

Having had some experience of Data Mining in a financial environment, I believed I could use these same techniques in my own P2P lending which, after over 12 months activity, I felt could be improved.

In this document, I explore the use of the freely available Data Mining Software “RapidMiner” and its Decision Tree capabilities when applied to the data available to investors from Bondora, a peer-to-peer (P2P) lending site.

Bondora

Bondora is a P2P lending site based in Estonia that “unites investors and borrowers from all corners of the world”, allowing investors to invest funds to satisfy advertised borrowing needs.

Fundamentally, Bondora also provides comprehensive data to investors, allowing detailed data downloads of the individual loans held by the investor, as well as data on every application made to Bondora (originally known as Isepankur) since the first application on 21st February, 2009.

It is the complete Bondora data set that I have used as the raw data for analysis as it is the best data available to find out which potential borrowers are the right match to the potential lenders.  Only if enough lenders feel that a loan application is worth investing in will the loan be fulfilled.  Self-selection is taking place in both elements of the loan fulfilment and this data is the result of that interaction.

Also shown in this data are some elements of loan performance post-drawdown.  Crucially, it shows those loans that subsequently defaulted (failed to make any payments for a period in excess of 60 days).  Although Bondora will chase the debt on behalf of the investor and have a track record of some success, there is no guarantee that the investment, or any part of it, will be returned.

Decision Trees

www.investopedia.com/terms/d/decision-tree.asp states: A schematic tree-shaped diagram used to determine a course of action or show a statistical probability.

In this case, I am using the data provided by Bondora on all its previous applications to reveal how the resulting loans that share similar characteristics have performed.

Specifically, I am using this data to show the percentage of those previous loans that have defaulted and using this to indicate how a similar, new application may perform should the application succeed in attracting enough investors.

In other words, I am using past performance data to show how future investments may perform – I feel sure I have seen this phrase somewhere before! Continue reading →

Growth of Bondora Resale Market

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This post is based on the findings, which German investor ‘Bandit55555’ posted in his own blog p2p-anlage.de. ‘Bandit55555’ is the investor at Bondora with the highest ROI (at least that I am aware of): He calculates his XIRR ROI to be 35.4%, while Bondora displays 57.5% for his portfolio. He achieves that by very diligently using the public download data supplied by Bondora as a basis for his investing and trading. In fact he even developed his own scoring system based on the data.

The secondary market of p2p lending marketplace Bondora was introduced in March 2013. Right now more than 24,400 loan parts are on sale. Using the data Bondora makes publicly available for download the following charts were created.


Number of loans sold on Bondora’s secondary market. Source p2p-anlage.de, reproduced here with permission. Continue reading →

Two Years Into P2P Lending Investment at Bondora – My Portfolio Review

wiseclerk 4 Comments

In October 2012 I started p2p lending at Bondora. Since then I periodically wrote on my experiences – you can read my last blog article here. Since the start I did deposit 14,000 Euro (approx. 17,800 US$). My portfolio is very much diversified. Most loan parts I hold are for loan terms between 36 and 60 months. Together the loans add up to 17,924 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 2,084 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 1,327 Euro principal is stuck in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 7,608 Euro in repaid principal back (which I reinvested).


Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status

At the moment I have 430 Euro in bids in open market listings and 394 Euro cash available. Continue reading →

High Fluctuation of Discounts and Markups on the Secondary Market of Bondora

wiseclerk

One advantage of Bondora is that this p2p lending market makes a lot of data available for download to investors. Recently Bondora added data on ‘Secondary market transaction history‘. In this article I will

  • analyse the data
  • use some examples to show how volatile the prices of traded loan parts can be
  • discuss some of the potential reasons for the inefficiency of the market
  • conclude with my opinion.

The basics of the Bondora secondary market

Bondora (at that time Isepankur) launched the secondary market in March 2013.

Sellers can list any current and overdue loan parts for sale as long they are not 60+ days overdue. Loan parts stay listed until they are sold or cancelled by seller for a maximum of 30 days. Loan parts are traded at principal value. Any unpaid accrued interest, overdue interest, overdue principal and unpaid late charges are disregarded for the sales prices and will – provided the borrower pays up anytime after the transaction – cause a windfall profit for the buyer. The seller can impose a discount or markup on the principal. The discount ca go as low as -99% whereas the possible markup was limited to 5% until July 24th, 2014 and increased to a maximum of 40% thereafter.

If a transaction occurs Bondora charges the seller and the buyer a 1.5% transaction fee each.

Using the data download

The download file I used had 159.7K data lines. This includes 66K cancelled listings and 35K failed listings. For the further analysis I used the 59.4K successful transactions.

On first look the market seems efficient: 8.3% of loan parts sold within 15 minutes. 20% sell within the first hour. But I felt the aggregate data might not tell the full story and I started to look how pricing (discount and markups) developed on individual loans.

First example is a 10,000 Euro A900 loan originated to an Estonian borrower on May 2013. This loan defaulted in October 2013 which ended the possibility to trade loan parts. In this short timespan 62 loan parts with a principal value of 1,748 Euro were traded (that’s out of 356 that were listed).

I took the transactions and spread them out over time on the x-axis and graphed the discount rate (blue line, left y-axis).


Chart 1: Example loan 1 (see larger image).

As you can see the price fluctuates widely from -10% discount to 5% markup, while the basic condition – the loan was overdue since begin of August did not change. I also added the orange line that shows how many days the loan was overdue when the seller listed it (DebtDaysAtStart) and the red line that shows how many days the loan was overdue when the transaction actually took place (DebtDaysAtEnd). At those times where the loan was overdue the distance between the two lines shows how long it took for a listed loan part before it sold (see green mark as example). Continue reading →

Review of My Current Bondora Portfolio – First Experiences in Trading Bondora+ Loans

wiseclerk 6 Comments

I started p2p lending at Bondora (formerly Isepankur) in the end of 2012. Since then I periodically wrote on my experiences – you can read my last report here. Since the start have deposited 13,000 Euro (approx. 17,600 US$). My portfolio is very diversified. Most loan parts I hold are for loan terms between 36 and 60 months. Together the loans add up to 15,610 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 1,579 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 888 Euro are in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 6,212 Euro in repaid principal back (which I reinvested).

Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status

Right now I have a high amount of cash in the account – 1,144 Euro. I’ll explain what led to this situation later on.


Chart 2: Screenshot of account balance

Return on Invest

Currently Isepankur shows my ROI to be over 28.8% (sidenote: I and several others observed that trading had no impact on the ROI shown. Then our ROI suddenly jumped on June 19th; we assume Bondora changed the calculation then to account (better?) for capital gains; here is an example of a portfolio with very big impact of trading). In my own calculations, using XIRR in Excel, I currently get a 25.9% ROI. Even if I assume that 50% of my 60+days overdue will not be recovered (past recovery rates reported by Bondora have been high) my ROI still calculates to 23.2% . Continue reading →

P2P lending service Bondora is now authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority

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Bondora is now authorised and regulated by the UK based Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The FCA supervised peer-to-peer lending license is the only regime available anywhere in Europe that subjects peer lenders under regulatory oversight, supervising peer lending companies. Bondora is one of the selected few peer lenders who is now operating under a license and probably the first non-UK p2p lending company licensed by FCA.

“The authorisation and regulation are good news for our customers across Europe,” commented the CEO of Bondora, Pärtel Tomberg and added that customers will greatly benefit from the supervision of the FCA as well as the additional requirements Bondora needs to comply with in order to maintain the authorisation. “We are likely the only peer lender outside of UK who obtained this authorisation and this type of regulation is something that we have been looking forward for a number of years,” added Tomberg.

The interim licence increases the strength of the company by making sure that Bondora complies with the rules set by the regulator. These regulations will ensure that Bondora and other regulated peer to peer lenders provide a more secure, transparent and sustainable service to its customers. These provisions include among others conduct of business rules (in particular, around disclosure and promotions), minimum capital requirements, client money protection rules, dispute resolution rules and a requirement for Bondora to take reasonable steps to ensure existing loans continue to be administered if the firm goes out of business. Bondora already complies with most of the regulations however there is a transitional period during which all processes need to be made compliant with the standards required.

Until now Bondora, as well as most other peer lenders, operated without a specific license and regulation since a suitable regulatory regime did simply not exist. The UK based Financial Conduct Authority started issuing specific peer licences from April 2014.

Bondora is the meeting place that unites investors and borrowers from all corners of the world. Bondora provides easy access to two mutually beneficial solutions: borrowers find the best available financing with affordable monthly payments, while investors generate profit on loan interest. The company serves more than 90 000 Customers from 29 different countries and has issued over 16 million EUR in loans and its users have earned more than 1.6 million EUR in interest income. Continue reading →