isepankur

Isepankur Rebrands As Bondora – Raised 1.3M

wiseclerk 7 Comments

P2P Lending marketplace Isepankur yesterday rebranded as Bondora. Bondora is active for borrowers in Estonia, Spain, Finland and Slovakia and lenders in 29 countries across Europe (all European Union countries plus Switzerland).

Following a new 1.3M Euro round of financing raised for the company, Bondora welcomes a new board to help the company in delivering an innovative business idea across the borders.

Mark Noetzold (a member of various supervisory boards and a lecturer for risk management in Germany, Switzerland and Austria), João P. S. Monteiro (an international manager responsible for global development at a blue-chip company) and Mati Otsmaa (a C-level management executive with extensive experience in consumer credit lending at American Express, Barclays, Citibank, Chase, Experian and HSBC) join forces to improve, market and raise awareness for the first cross-border peer-lending platform Bondora.

„Direct or p2p lending is the most rapidly developing financial service today and has a huge future potential by offering the best solutions to the borrowers and high returns for the lenders. I believe that Bondora, with its cross-border strategy, strong team and the ability to execute fast, has the potential to change the world of finance to be more transparent and straightforward,” – commented João P. S. Monteiro, board member and one of the angel investors.

According to an article in E24 Postimees the new investors now hold about 19% to 20% of the company shares.

„Over the last 5 years we have brought together over 70,000 customers from 29 countries to borrow and lend on our platform. The newly raised capital will be used to improve, market and raise awareness of our service further. Today we have a product, where a telephone engineer from Estonia could get funds to renovate his flat from a dozen of lenders located in any European country. Not only our borrowers get a chance to have their loans financed, but they get the best available deal on the marketplace. A secretary from Slovakia, for example, ready to pay 28% for a 600 Euro loan to study English, might end up paying only 12% because lenders pile in.  It is a simple and secure application process for the borrowers and a possibility to diversify private investment for the lenders. At the moment 26% of our lenders come from Germany, 11% from the UK and 4% from Switzerland (with the rest being spread across Europe). With the rapid growth of the company in the last year, the old name could no longer accommodate room for our cross-border growth, that is why today we are also launching our new name – Bondora, and our website available in 23 languages,” – commented the CEO of Bondora, Pärtel Tomberg. Continue reading →

P2P Lending Site Isepankur – Review of My Portfolio After Q1 2014

wiseclerk 2 Comments

It’s been one and a half years now since I started  p2p lending at Isepankur. And since my last report another 4 months have gone by. Since the start have deposited 10,000 Euro (approx. 13,750 US$).  I hold over 650 loan parts – the diversification achieved is very good. Together the loans add up to 12,636 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 1067 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 490 Euro are in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 4,945 Euro in repaid principal back (which I reinvested).

Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status

Right now I have 206 Euro cash in the account which is up from close to zero around the middle of the month. 25 Euro are tied in bids on current loan listings and will originate in the next few days.


Chart 2: Screenshot of account balance

Return on Invest

Currently Isepankur shows my ROI to be over 27.5%. In my own calculations, using XIRR in Excel, I currently get a 25.6% ROI. In the first months there was a considerable gap when comparing these differently calculated ROI figures. As my portfolio ages, the gap is closing. The statistic section tells me, that I am currently the lender with the 15th best ROI (counting all lenders that have invested for at least 12 months and at least 10,000 Euro). Continue reading →

How To Filter Isepankur Loans to Reduce Risks and Achieve Higher ROIs

wiseclerk 1 Comment

As you all know, if you are a regular reader of this blog, I have been investing on the Isepankur p2p lending service for over a year. So far, I’m doing pretty well – Isepankur consistently ranks me into the top 10% of investors by achieved ROI. But I have to admit that my strategy was just based on common sense (or call it gut feeling), some general p2p lending knowledge and experience won over time. Of course I obeyed fundamentals like diversification.

Now Isepankur is one of the first European p2p lending marketplaces that made available the raw loan data for everyone. You can download it here.

What does the data export contain?

The data export contains over 50 parameters for each loan that Isepankur orginated since February 2011. Isepankur says new datasets will be published monthly.

How do I analyse the data?

A sophisticated person – or a statistican – will rightly recommend to use multivariate statistics to most accurately get conclusions from analysing this loan data. I don’t have the tools or the expertise to do that, so I thought I just give it a try and look how far I get in Excel. By the way – this is going to be a rather long blog post, but I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

First I defined a population of loans (universe) I wanted to look at. I selected Estonian credit grade “1000” loans (thereby excluding other credit grades and Spanish and Finnish loans) to get a somewhat homogeneous loan population. Initially I looked at loans with the parameter ‘TwoMonthsFromFirstPayment’, in order to look only at loans that are old enough to default. Later I also excluded loans that originated after Sep. 1st, 2013.
That leaves me with a population of 1325 loans to analyse.

What I want to find out

I am trying to find factors in the loan application that indicate an above average probability that a loan will go into 60+ days overdue. While Isepankur actually still recovers large parts of the principal of loans that go into 60+ days overdue (see these useful charts), it would still be great if I as an investor could reduce the percentage of my investments that become 60+ days late. There is a parameter in the download named ‘InDebt60Day’. This is what I analysed. Note that the description says ‘This loan has at one moment been overdue for 60 days’, meaning it does include loans that are now current again, or even paid off. But if we want to reduce the risks of a loan ever going into 60+ days overdue this is the parameter we want to look at.
For 126 of the 1325 loans this parameter is set to ‘1’, meaning the average risk is 9.5%. What does that absolute number tell us? Nothing much yet, it is just a reference point I’ll use to show above average and below average risk loans.

Let’s start

Okay, I downloaded the data set into Excel and excluded all loans other than the population described above. Now I use the pivot table function of Excel to look at the data.

One easy finding is that gender influences the 60+ days risk (from now on I’ll just call it risk in short).

I marked the percentage for loans to men that has ‘InDebt60Day’=’1’ orange as it is considerably above average and the percentage for loans to woman green as it is considerably below average. Continue reading →

Isepankur Adds Slovakian Loans Starting Monday

wiseclerk

P2P lending service Isepankur will open to borrowers in Slovakia starting next Monday. While Isepankur is open for lenders from all over Europe this is the fourth borrower market after Estonia, Finland and Spain. I contacted CEO Pärtel Tomberg and he told me:

Slovakia is a small market with a very strong potential. We have already gathered a great deal of in small markets Estonia, a market roughly 20% the size of Slovakia, and in Finland, same size as Slovakia in terms of population, and will be looking to translate this into a successful launch. The market is quite similar to the markets mentioned earlier with a small number of large banks and lack of alternative offers to the consumers. There is a general lack of affordable and easy-to-use credit products and we will be looking to fill that void with our offer that will be very similar to what we have in Estonia, Finland and Spain. Our target would be to generate approximately 4 million euro of monthly loan volume in Slovakia in the matter of 2-3 years however as always we will start small and conservatively to ensure that only quality loans are offered to the investors.

To apply for a p2p loan the minimum income criteria borrowers from Slovakia have to fulfill are listed in the investment guide. They are roughly the same as for the Estonian borrowers. Continue reading →

My P2P Lending Portfolio at Isepankur 12/2013 & Isepankur to add Slovakia

wiseclerk 15 Comments

It’s been 14 months now since I started a p2p lending portfolio at Isepankur. I feel confident now, that I understand fairly well how to get above average results. During the first months I usually logged in at least daily and watched bidding patterns and resale activity to learn how the other lenders made use of the instruments. I also did a lot of micromanagement at that time. Lately I think I could satisfy my information thirst by logging in once or twice a week. Some of my automated bidding profiles have been running unchanged for weeks or months. I do still spend a big amount of time on p2p lending related news & forums (but not limited to Isepankur).

I have deposited 10,000 Euro (approx. 13,500 US$) since starting in the end of 2012. I hold over 600 loan parts – the diversification achieved is very good. Together the loans add up to 11,399 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 347 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 208 Euro are in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 3,559 Euro in repaid principal back (which I reinvested).

Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status

Right now I have 290 Euro cash in the account which is much more than my usual cash position. 165 Euro are tied in bids on current loan listings and will originate in the next few days.


Chart 2: Screenshot of account balance

Return on Invest

Currently Isepankur shows my ROI to be over 27% (see chart 3 ). In my own calculations, using XIRR in Excel, I currently get a 24.4% ROI. In the first months there was a considerable gap when comparing these differently calculated ROI figures. As my portfolio ages, the gap is closing. The statistic section tells me, that I am currently the lender with the 5th best ROI (counting all lenders that have invested for at least 12 months and at least 10,000 Euro).

Continue reading →

My Isepankur Investment After 11 Months

wiseclerk

Three months have passed since I last wrote about the status of my p2p lending investment at Isepankur. I have deposited 8,000 Euro (approx. 10,500 US$) since starting in the end of 2012. I hold over 500 loan parts – the diversification achieved is very good. Together the loans add up to 9,190 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 248 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 149 Euro are in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 2,320 Euro in repaid principal back (which I reinvested).

Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status

Most of the money in my account is working to earn interest. Only 30 Euro are currently held in cash. 5 Euro are tied in a bid on a current loan listing and will originate in the next few days.


Chart 2: Screenshot of account balance

Return of Invest

Currently Isepankur shows me a 26.7% annual ROI (see chart 3 ). In my own calculations, using XIRR in Excel, I currently get a 23.5% ROI. Continue reading →