lendico

A Visit with Lendico

wiseclerk

Last week I flew to Berlin to visit Lendico and met the management. Lendico is the third entrant in the German p2p lending space and launched in December 2013. The fact that they are financed by Rocket Internet, the venture capital arm of the Samwer brothers, attracted additional attention to their launch.

International Expansion

A major topic in our conversation was the known plan of Lendico to offer the p2p lending service in multiple European countries. While Lendico would disclose neither which countries they target next nor details on the timeline they stated that additional countries will be live within the next 6 months. Lendico will manage major functions centrally from the Berlin office and use national offices for some functions of operations.

I learned that Lendico will allow cross-border lending like Isepankur, meaning a German lender that registered could not lend only to German borrowers but also to borrowers resident in any market that Lendico opens to.
Challenging issues to be dealt with are multiple currencies and different credit rating systems in different countries. For the later Lendico aims to simplifiy this for lenders by translating ratings in Lendico score classes A to E that will be used in all markets.

Prompted by my question Lendico CEO Dominik Steinkühler said that in the long run there is a high propability that there will be one large European p2p lending market rather than many fragmented national ones.

Competition

Currently Lendico sees Auxmoney as main competitor. Asked whether he expects the fast growing UK p2p lending services to expand internationally Steinkühler told me that he sees no signs for this as these players seem quite satisfied with growing in the UK market. Continue reading →

P2P Lending Services – Loan Volumes November 2013

wiseclerk 1 Comment

P2P lending volumes grew further in November. Prosper points out that the slight decline was to be expected due to less origination days in this month. Looks like Funding Circle and Ratesetter are catching up on Zopa in Britain. I do monitor development of p2p lending figures for many markets. Since I already have most of the data on file I can publish statistics on the monthly loan originations for selected p2p lending services. Next month I expect to add figures for two more services to the table.

Table: P2P Lending Volumes in November 2013. Source: own research
Note that volumes have been converted from local currency to US$ for the sake of comparison. Some figures are estimates/approximations.

Notice to p2p lending services not listed:
If you want to be included in this chart in future, please email the following figures on the first working day of a month: total loan volume originated since inception, loan volume originated in previous month, number of loans originated in previous month, average nominal interest rate of loans originated in previous month.