The German site for social lending Smava.de today allowed borrowers of the lower credit grades G and H to participate. Previously only borrowers of credit grades A through F could participate. According to information published by Smava, 80% of the German population have credit grades in the range A-F, while credit grade G accounts for 10% and credit grade H accounts for 5% of the population.
However Smava, so far has experienced not one late payment. Three payment cycles have been completed with 100% of borrowers paying on time.
Other changes at the Smava site today included a lower minimum bid of 250 Euro (down from 500 Euro) and a higher interest rate ceiling (maximum interest rate 18%; up from 15%).
Dutch p2p lending service Boober.nl changed the rules last week. Lenders are now restricted to a maximum investment sum of 39000 Euro. Boober told users that this step confirms that Boober is a platform for individuals and not for professionals or companies. It is believed that this step was neccessary due to regulation.
German Smava has restricted lenders to a maximum of 25000 Euros since the start. This too, is a precaution, since under German regulation professional lending without a license is not allowed.
Today I will take a look at the communication approaches of Prosper, Lendingclub, Zopa and Smava. Since it is hard to judge the individual customer support these companies offer, the focus of this post is on the mass communication channels. To communicate their services to the lenders and borrowers the services can use the website's FAQ/tutorials, a forum, blog(s) and newsletter(s).
Prosper.com Prosper has very detailed FAQs, which leave no aspect open. There are tutorials, videos and webinars. The Prosper forums are very active. While Prosper announce changes to the service in detail (here), the policy usually seems not to comment on individual users questions (except for the bug report section). Prosper seems to rely on users to communicate and educate each other in the forums. There has been criticism about censorship and deleted posts in the forums which led some users to set up an prosper independent forum. As far as I can tell Prosper has no blog of its own, but there is a personal blog of the CTO John Witchel. But it is not very active and will probably not be found by the average Prosper user.
Zopa The Zopa FAQs are detailed, too. The Zopa Forum is quite active with Zopa staff members responding to posts and questions. Zopa has a company blog which has a leisurely tone and often is offtopic. In my opinion it could get more informative for lenders or borrowers. The same applies to the newsletters Zopa sends out.
Smava Smava maintains a very detailed and good FAQ. The Smava forum is pretty quite, but Smava staff usually is responsive to user questions. There is no blog. Smava is only 3 month old and so far there have been only 2 or 3 newsletters, which were mainly a summary of developments.
Lendingclub Lendingclub communicates very different from the others. Mainly it relies on it's blog which is in fact directly on the Lendingclub.com homepage. The blog is very active with up to 2 or 3 posts per day. Not only does it explain details of the lendingclub service but also has general advice on personal finance, e.g. on obtaining and maintaining good credit. Lendingclub has lots of guest authors contributing to the blog. The FAQ are somewhat hidden and only available to logged in users (unless you know the direct link). The information, when located, is detailed (e.g. states). As far as I am aware there is no Lendingclub forum.
My impression is that Prosper and Smava communicate in a style that appears more corporate and 'old fashioned' always pondering what information can be released and what for. Prosper has occasionaly received rather aggresive feedback of users, citing them of being non-responsive to the wishes of their users. Zopa has a more buddying tone – hey take it easy. Lendingclub sounds educational to borrowers, aiming to help them by supplying them information. On the other hand Lendingclub's approach seems a little marketing driven, because their approach gains them search engine and blog visibility.
It's been roughly 3 month since the launch of German p2p lending service Smava.de and I want to do a short résumé on the results so far. One huge achievement is that all borrowers made their first payment on time – no lates so far. While it certainly is to early for conclusions, since only one payment cycle (first repayment in the beginning of June) has taken place, the outlook for Smava concerning low default rates is very good. Looks like Smava will be much nearer to Zopa then to Prosper in this point.
Smava has a very restrictive approach for admitting borrowers and loan applications. Not only does Smava verify identity, credit score and income documentation – it goes one step further and calculates if the borrower's financial situation is well enough to allow repayment of the desired loan sum. Only after completions of all these checks is the borrower allowed to publish is loan listing.
As a result the majority of borrowers (about 70 to 80 percent of all applicants) are declined from using Smava. While this strict validation is good for quality it does slow the growth of Smava.
Since the launch Smava enjoyed large and positive press coverage (newspapers, magazines, TV, internet). Despite the good PR, Smava funded only about 50 loans with a loan volume of about 150000 Euro in the first 3 month. There are enough lenders – Smava lacks borrowers. The low volume contrasts sharply from the figures Boober.nl achieved in the Dutch market (see previous post)
The majority of loan listings that were published did get funded. Smava has two interesting functions that are unique and not used on other p2p lending services:
Borrowers can close the loan early provided it is more than 50% funded At Smava, listings usually run 14 days. However a borrower can decide to take the funded amount (provided it is at least 50% of the total amount) and close the listing early. Several borrowers have used this function. A borrower can open another listing (provided he has not reached his personal maximum repayment allowance) instantly for the remainder (he can even choose a different interest rate for subsequent listings)
Borrowers can increase the offered interest rates on their open listing. If this happens the change is applied for all bids on this listing. This is a widely used feature. Many borrowers start with (ridciously) low rates. After a few days they realise their loan will not fund and they increase their interest rate – often in several steps
Smava has yet to find a good concept for groups. While there are groups their purpose is yet to be defined. Consequently the majority of borrowers did not bother to join a group.
I will continue post updates on the development of Smava here on P2P-Banking.com.
Following the previous post on Smava.de here is a look on the business case of the smava startup and the chances for profit.
Currently Smava earns only when a loan funds. Smava charges the borrower a 1% fee of the loan amount. Only other fee are 10 Euros per dunning letter (which is covers the costs of the dunning letters but is otherwise neglectable).
Possible reason for the low fee (in comparison to Prosper and Zopa) are the low interest rates in Germany which might not allow for higher fees. Loans range from 500 to 10.000 Euro. Assuming an average loan amount of 3000 Euro Smava would earn 30 Euro.
Looking at transaction costs, we have:
Identity check of borrowers and lenders via PostIdent (approx 5 Euros each)
Creditgrade check (estimate 1 Euro)
Validation of documentation for borrowers (estimate 5 Euro, based on typical call center cost, actual inhouse costs could be higher or lower)
Validation of documentation for lenders (estimate 3 Euro, based on typical call center cost, actual inhouse costs could be higher or lower)
Even looking at this transaction costs without taking into regard marketing, overhead, legal and setup costs it seems that Smava faces quite a challenge and will have to focus on automation of processes.
A critical factor in my view is the fact, that costs for lender and borrower identification are incurred before anything happens and regardless if borrowers and lenders become active. Learnings form Prosper.com are that 103.000 listings created only 9000 loans, which means 90% of listings gounfunded. Of the 230000 Prosper.com members about 23000 have the role lender. Only 12000 of these were active in the last 30 days.
Prosper does some verification only when a listing will fund.
In a call founder Eckart Vierkant reasoned that a lower minimum was not necessary due to the automatic risk spreading through the Anleger-Pool (see previous post).
The 500 Euro minimum has 2 interesting effects:
since the lowest unit is 500 Euro, deposits from 0 to 499 Euro will accumulate on the lender accounts. Lenders collect non interest on these unloaned amount. Assuming an average 'parked' amount is 200 Euro and that the bank partner of Smava invests this money earning a return of 5 % that would mean 10 Euro profit per year and active lender
the 500 Euro minimum keeps small lenders out (at least in theory since anybody can register for free)
It will be interesting to see how Smava deals with that challenge in future.
Startup Smava.de starts offering p2p lending in Germany. Anybody can lend or request a loan online. Borrowers, after registering will by checked for identity and credit grade by smava. Smava uses PostIdent (a service offered by German postal service Deutsche Post) to verify the identity of the borrower and relies on credit report information from Schufa, a leading German credit bureau. Smava is only open to borrowers with credit grades A to F (which smava says leads to expected default rates between 1.4% and 7.2%).
After validation the borrower can post his request which can range from 500 to 10000 Euro and state the interest rate he is willing to pay. Lenders can bid in intervals of 500 (minimum) Euros.
If the loan request is fully funded the loan is payed to the borrower which will repay it in monthly rates for a period of 36 months. The borrower has the right to payoff early anytime (without any additional fees).
Smava does not take fees from the lenders. Smava charges 1% fee of the loan amount from the borrower.
An interesting though complicated instrument are the so-called Anleger-Pools (engl. lender pools). The purpose of these is risk spreading over all loans of a given creditgrade. Say a specific B loan is not payed back. In this case this would lower the repayment on all B loans (not just this specific one). Does this mean the lender can invest in any loan regardless of description. No because this instrument applies only to repayments not to interest due.
Due to German regulation smava, which is a startup founded as limited company, had to partner with a bank. While there are different views on whether under German laws a banking licence is required to run a p2p lending platform or not, Smava chose the safe route by partnering with the ‘Bank für Investments und Wertpapiere AG (BiW)’. This way deposits are secured by the German Einlagensicherungsfonds. Deposits which are not lend out, do not earn interest.
Some interesting feature, when viewed in comparison to Zopa, Prosper and Boober:
There are individual listings (like Prosper)
There are groups (like Prosper), but seemingly no group rewards
There is no auction bidding down interest rates (or I missed it)
In case of non-payment (for over 40 days) smava has the right to sell the loan to the collection agency Intrum Justita for a percentage of the value
maximum a lender can loan is 25000 Euro
maximum per loan is 10000 Euro
minimum bid is 500 Euro
only German residents can borrow or lend
no interest on unlend deposits
simple fee structure (borrower pays 1% of loan amount), no late or other fees
new Anleger-Pool (lender pool) concept for risk spreading on defaults within same credit grade
The management team behind Smava has a lot of ecommerce experience. I could not determine when smava launched publicly, according to forum and loan activity it can have been no more then a few days ago.
Smava already received press coverage by a large regional newspaper.
P.S.: If you blog about this a link back here would be appreciated. Thank you!
