Crowd-lending portfolio review for June 2022

Loans marketplace Iuvo announced that they would move their registration for Bulgaria. No actual reason was given for the transfer, but it’s most likely related to licensing concerns and withholding tax.

Farewell claims, hello Notes ! As Mintos is becoming a regulated entity, a new financial instrument is introduced in July 1st, 2022. Loans bought before this date are now called Claims, while the new investments are Notes.

A complete overview of the switch to Notes would require much more than a few lines. Here are the most important consequences for investors :

• A very negative effect is that the secondary market is now closed for claims, and only Notes will be sold on the secondary market. Investors are thus stuck with their loans bought earlier until they are totally reimbursed, get bought back or the originator defaults (this is Mintos, after all).
• By default, a 20% withholding tax applies to Notes investments.
• Yet another consequence is that the minimal investment amount is now €50 instead of €10
• Also, not every loan originator currently offer Notes. I’ve counted 25 different lending companies, down from more than fifty.
• On a positive side, uninvested funds are segregated and protected.
• Investors information is supposed to be improved by the presence of prospectuses.

Similarly to Mintos, ViaInvest supposedly started to offer ABS (asset-backed securities) on July, 1st. However, one week later it’s still unclear whether this change is in effect or not (!). Additionally, it’s been confirmed that legal entities initially won’t be able to invest in ABS.

Lendermarket is still a very polarizing platform. On the bright side, performance is excellent – apart from Omaraha, no other platform offers such returns -. On the other hand, the amount of complaints from investors is staggering. Between the very high percentage of delayed loans, the unclear terms for cashback campaigns and the lack of secondary market, this platform clearly won’t suit all investors.

I’m personally satisfied with this portfolio, but I don’t plan to allocate more than 5% of my portfolio to this platform.

My XIRR at Afranga is very satisfying, especially when considering the reliability of the platform’s loans originator StikCredit. Unfortunately, investing there turns out to be frustrating sometimes.

Indeed, interest rates at Afranga keep on changing frequently – from 18% one year ago to 12% at the beginning of the year, and now 14% -. What doesn’t change is the difficulty to have all your funds invested – cash drags are frequent, although they’re shorter than at the end of last year or in early 2022 –

Although Robocash group had a bad Q1 due to the impact of the war in Ukraine, everything is still repaid on time. As a result, the performance of this portfolio hasn’t changed much in two years.

The performance for my Esketit portfolio is slightly down. Indeed, I stopped investing in the highest-yielding loans (Jordanian ones with 14% interest rates), so the performance of this portfolio decreased a bit. However, now that loans from CZ yield the same 12% as Spanish loans (instead of 10%), the performance should stabilize slightly below 12%.

In a nutshell, I really like Esketit. Between the large loans volume, the great interest rates and the excellent ergonomics, it’s hard to fault this platform.

Performance for my Mintos portfolio is still decent, but it’s clearly going down and is unlikely to stop anytime soon.

Indeed, I could only sell half of my Wowwo loans before this loan originator got suspended last winter. In addition, pending payment from IDF Eurasia are increasing. I’m clearly paying the price for not managing my portfolio as carefully as I previously did !

One of my oldest portfolios, ViaInvest is still performing well. The returns are extremely stable, in spite of occasional cash drags. Thanks to rates increased to 12%, I expect the performance to be stable.

As expected, the performance of my PeerBerry‘s portfolio’ is greatly affected by the war in Ukraine. Indeed, a large part of the platform’s loans come either from Russia or Ukraine. As I partly invested in these, my returns took a hit and are down from a high point of around 11.50%.

Fortunately, the platform (and the associated lending companies) did an excellent job when it comes to returning funds to investors. Indeed, 35% of the total loans amount in these two countries has already been repaid (42% in Ukraine and 23% in Russia).

I greatly appreciate PeerBerry’s transparency, as they explicitly list these figures in their statistics page.

Although Moncera offered mostly single-digit loans for most of 2021, the XIRR of for this portfolio is still above 10%.

Moreover, as of June 2022 interest rates have increased noticeably – 11% loans are currently available, a great improvement from the previous level -. These loans provide an excellent risk/reward ratio thanks to Placet Group’s financial solidity.

Lande (which is the new name for LendSecured after a merger) is one of my most recent portfolios, funded in early 2021. Performance thus takes time to build up, but it’s finally getting close to 10%. – Overall I’m very satisfied with this platform, both in terms of available opportunities and ergonomics. I haven’t written a new review for a long time, so I’m considering properly reviewing Lande. It’s a good opportunity for me to study platforms in detail, especially when they offer other asset classes than consumer loans !

The performance for my Iuvo portfolio is slightly down overall, and still stands below 9%. I unfortunately don’t expect it to increase much. Indeed, I just realized that part of my funds invested in CBC originator are in recovery.

As a side note, this review is extremely outdated, so bringing it up-to-date is a priority.

The performance of my EstateGuru portfolio is slightly down from a maximum of 8,72% in December 2020. Roughly one third of my portfolio’s projects is either delayed or defaulted.

Most troublesome projects are located in Germany. I stopped investing in projects from this country (as well as from Finland), but still have several in my portfolio.

Although my BulkEstate performance is still decent, many projects on the platform got extended. Complaints about the lack of communication are also (understandably) starting to pile up. Overall, ReInvest24‘s communication and projects handling is much superior.

On a positive note, recovery for a loan defaulted in summer 2020 (Aleksandra Apartments Commercial premises) was finally completed in June. Although the final returns are low (a 7% penalty fee for a two years delay), one can only rejoice that this default didn’t incur any loss for investors.

The returns for my ReInvest24 portfolio keep on increasing slowly. Many projects in my portfolio are full bullet or only pay every six months, which explains that the XIRR is still much lower than expected.

In the context of the war between Russia and Ukraine, I avoid investing in new loans from Moldova.

In terms of performance, HeavyFinance lags behind Lande. In addition, Lande‘s website has much better ergonomics. I thus tend to favor Lande when it comes to add funds.

However, I still plan to grow my HeavyFinance portfolio slightly as they deal with a very interesting asset class.

As my CrowdEstate returns are pitiful and I stopped reinvesting, I seldom mention this platform. I’m basically waiting for the defaults to resolve – with a large expected loss -, and for other loans to either be reimbursed or (sigh) default.

On a positive note, a long-defaulted loan was finally recovered and I managed to turn a slight profit. Moreover, real-estate investment loans on the platform seem to perform well. I may even resume investing on the platform if I manage to get back the capital from business loans !