Today, when I funded 2 more Kiva loans, I stumbled across the profile of Laurent D, from Belgium, who has funded 23,079 Kiva loans in the last 3 years. On his profile he states “I love the idea of helping people reach their financial independence”. Well said. And I bow to the dedication of making that many loans.
This got me wondering if there are lenders with even larger portfolio’s funded? There isn’t any information on this in the Kiva stats section.
Update: After using queries at Kivadata.org, it looks to me, that LaurentD actually is the lender, who did the most loans on Kiva, with Good Dogg, from the US, following second with 17,077 loans.
At MYC4 it is somewhat awkward for lenders to keep track of their portfolio. Some lenders keep track manually in Excel lists of their loans.
MYC4 lender Bente Pedersen created the following image, which by it’s coloring visualizes that the number of late payments and non-payments on the loan he funded grew over time.
MyC4 has the first three Tanzania loans online. I bid a small amount on the loan requestof Eliamin Eliakimu Swai who runs a car spare parts repair shop in Dar es Salaam. Local provider in Tanzania is Growth Africa Capital, which also serves Kenya.
After the Loanio launch yesterday, already some more loan listings are up at Loanio.com. Right now I count 8 listings. Probably more are in the making. No bids yet, which is not surprising as the lenders have to sign up and transfer money to Loanio first. Michael Solomon, the CEO and founder of Loanio had a lucky week according to the Loanio blog – not only did he launch Loanio, but he also won $1,000 in the New York State Lottery.
Zopa reached 25 million pounds in loans. Zopa states cash depositers received an average 8.3% return after charges at a default rate of 0.04 percent. (Sources: Zopa, Financial Times)
About a year ago I started lending money to African entrepreneurs via MyC4.com. So far it did meet my expectations. The process of uploading money worked without problems, there were always enough loan applications to select from and the offered interest rates were high enough to allow for good returns despite the risks. The only point, where the usability need to be vastly improved is a better status overview for the payment status of all loans in the portfolio. MyC4 does show the payment status in detail for each loan, but its hard to get an aggregate overview.
I invested at 13.8% average nominal interest rate. 194 loans are currently running, 29 are repaid in full, 12 are open/pending (not yet disbursed), 1 defaulted and 4 were cancelled.
To roughly calculate estimate my ROI I looked at my account display at MyC4
About 12-13 months ago I uploaded 1,506.94 Euro. Now my account value is 1,625.24 Euro (9,09 Euro available + 124,62 Euro pending bids + 1.491,93 Euro Outstanding principal). That results in an ROI of 7.9% so far. Naturally it would drop, if the outstanding principal is not repaid in full due to defaults.
The ROI is much lower then the average interest rate, since it does take weeks before an investment in a loan becomes active – and unlend money does not yield interest. A further point is that several late loans affect the ROI.
