Omaraha review

Table of contents

Omaraha's overview

Omaraha offers mostly partially secured consumer loans. The highest interest rates currently available for these loans are slightly above 19%. Loans come with a partial 60% buyback guarantee A buyback guarantee is a guarantee provided by the platform or a loan originator. If repayment of a loan is delayed by more than a given delay (usually 30 or 60 days), the platform or loan originator will buy back the loan. The guarantee may cover only part of the capital, or in a much more interesting case, both the capital and accrued interests. As the conditions vary from one platform to another, it’s very important to check this point. which covers 60% of the capital.

My opinion on Omaraha

I used to really love Omaraha. It was one of the first P2P platforms I used, along with Mintos and Twino. At some point, up to 60% of loans portfolio was invested there !

For a long time, thanks to the excellent performance, it was totally worth investing some time (and of course money) on this platform, in spite of the terrible interface. But now that the loans volume has decreased, it’s harder to recommend it as much as I used to. Moreover, Omaraha’s lack of transparency and non-existent communication are clear negatives.

In spite of this, for investors who want to focus solely on consumer loans, Omaraha still offers the best returns.

Detailed ratings

Actual performance

The performance of my Omaraha’s portfolio is by far the best among P2P platforms.

Loans liquidity

The loans volume has decreased by 50% over the last two years.

Reporting

Like everything else in Omaraha’s website, the reporting is extremely basic.

Transparency & reliability

The platform’s level of transparency is really low.

Website ergonomics

It’s by far the most dated platform, with an extremely painful interface.

Omaraha's pros & cons

Pros

  • Excellent performance, in spite of the lowered interest rates

Cons

  • Buyback guarantee is only partial
  • Omaraha’s website looks terribly dated and is very hard to use
  • Decreasing loans volume
  • Lack of secondary market or early exit option

Loans characteristics

Loans durations

Short-term : less than one month

Medium-term : one month to one year

Long-term : more than one year

Loans kinds

Consumer

Minimal investment

€10

Buyback guarantee

Buyback guarantee available

Currencies

EUR – Euro

Overview of Omaraha's loans

All of Omaraha’s loans are in Euro.

Although it’s possible fully secured loans, there’s basically no point in doing so. Indeed, as of May 2021, their interest rates stand at 3% ! It’s really a pitiful amount when reliable competitors such as Robocash or Moncera offer double-digit interest rates.

Omaraha‘s real strength is their partially secured loans. Gross interest rates for these vary between 17% and 35% in Estonia. There are a few loans from Slovakia available as well with even higher interest rates, but their total volume is low.

Out of this gross interest rate, Omaraha takes a 30% commission. This results in a net interest rate of 24.5% for the high-yield loans. It’s of course a very high figure; actual returns are of course lower, as the buyback guarantee is only partial.

That’s my first critic towards Omaraha : why don’t they display only the net interest ? It would make things much easier for investors.

Loans volume

The monthly funded volume has decreased by 50% compared to 2019. It currently stands at roughly €700,000. As a result, large portfolios probably won’t be totally invested.

Buyback guarantee

Omaraha‘s partial guarantee is provided through a warranty fund. Reimbursement are triggered once reimbursements is more than 3 months late, which a longer delay than most competitors.

Before the Covid-19 epidemics, investors were compensated 60% and 80% of the loan balance. This figure was decreased in Spring 2020 in order to ensure the fund’s sustainability as the default rate increased. Since March 2021, 60% of the remaining capital is reimbursed.

This decrease allowed to stabilize the amount available in the warranty fund, which now stands around €350,000.

Platform’s transparency and reliability

TODO

Omaraha’s background and team

Omaraha is one of the longest-standing P2P platforms. Indeed, it was established in 2011 ! Its offices are located in Haapsalu, Estonia.

Loans descriptions

Most P2P provide at least basic details about the borrower : gender, age, location and so on. Omaraha doesn’t display any of it.

However, for consumer loans, information regarding the borrower doesn’t really matter. It’s much more important to lend through a reliable lending company.

Loan originators reliability

Like for Robocash or ViaInvest, loans on Omaraha are originated by the platform. Unfortunately, absolutely no detail is publicly available regarding the platform’s financials.

Track record

Likewise, Omaraha’s track record is rather opaque. Registered investors have access to statistics regarding the overall loans portfolio. Unfortunately, they’re as hard to read as everything else on the website.

On the positive side, the active management of the warranty fund seems to ensure the platform’s sustainability.

Reporting & statistics availability

At this point you’re probably starting to get the drift… In a nutshell, reporting is very poor and hard to understand.

Platform's features

Early exit

Early exit NOT AVAILABLE

Investing methods

Auto-invest

Manual investing

Secondary market

Omaraha doesn’t provide this feature. This means investors won’t be able to resell their loans before the maturity date.

Manual investing

I used to invest manually in addition to using auto-invest. However, the small volume of available loans now make this a loss of time.

Moreover, the interface is just terrible. Indeed, the “Loan applications” screen – which displays the most recent loans – doesn’t support filtering. It’s possible to sort the columns, though.

Auto-invest

Setting up Omaraha‘s auto-invest (actually called “Investment terms” on the website) is not too difficult once you figure out what interest rate to request for each credit rating. And that’s not an easy task at first.

Interest rates vary depending on the following criteria :

  • Borrower’s country
  • Score granted to the borrower by the platform. It stands between 0 (most risky) and 100 (safest), but only loans rated 601 or more appear on the platform. I only invest in loans with the highest rating (901+)
  • Loan duration

For each duration, you can indicate the gross interest rate (paid by the applicant) and maximum amount. The bonus allows you to speed up auto-investment : it will give a chunk of interests back to Omaraha, in exchange for a higher priority. I always leave it at 0%, as I’m not in a hurry to invest my funds. The actual interest you’ll receive is displayed as “Loan interest”, but be warned that the bonus doesn’t seem to be taken into account !

But how do you figure out which interest rate to offer ? The “Offers” button displays the following screen.

This table shows the currently available interest rates for each duration and rating. Should you find it hard to use, just realize that it has been much simplified compared to the previous version !

Note that setting the interest rate slightly below the value displayed by the table may speed up your auto-invest speed, as there will be less competition between investors at lower rates.

Website’s ease of use

Languages

English, Russian, Estonian

Funding methods

Available languages & translations quality

Surprisingly, the English translation of Omaraha‘s website is really correct. Their translator is apparently much more talented than their web designer !

However, there are still parts of the website which are basically impossible to decipher. Among them, the tooltips which supposedly help us to understand the statistics.

Account funding and funds withdrawal

Instructions regarding deposits and withdrawals are available under Accounts / Transfer.

Funding you account via a SEPA transfer usually takes 2 day. It will mostly depend on your bank as Omaraha processes deposits quickly. Don’t forget to fill in your reference number !

Unlike most competitors, Omaraha charges a fee for withdrawals. They cost € 0.50, which of course isn’t expensive but I obviously prefer platforms to have no fee for investors !

As a side note, Omaraha’s terrible website designer has struck again in the withdrawal page. Indeed, it’s impossible to withdraw money directly from an investing account. You first have to move funds from your specific country account to the virtual account, then you can withdraw them from this account. This adds a totally useless step to the withdrawal process.

When withdrawing funds, your bank account may not be displayed. This seems to happen if the name provided by your bank doesn’t exactly match Omaraha’s records. It may be caused by accents in your name, or if you omitted your second name. In this case, contact the support via the link titled “click here” under “Support” (once again, Omaraha’s color scheme doesn’t make this information very visible).

Website’s design and ergonomics

That’s my #1 concern with Omaraha. While there’s been some improvement on the interest rates screen, there’s still a lot to do.

For most websites, it’s straightforward to invest your money, either manually or automatically. But Omaraha makes this task rather hard, due to a poor user interface and weird design choices. We already saw that they choose to display the interest rate paid by the borrower (gross rate) instead of the interest rate paid to you, but there are other choices just as annoying.

Take the credit rating : most P2P lending sites rate credit a simple way, like A / B / C. Omaraha, on the other hand, uses a credit rating (called “score”) between 0 and 1000, and only accepts requests scoring above 600. So as investors, we only saw scores from 600 to 1000. Why not simplify the scale ,

Reporting

The statistics are rather basic, and just like the rating system, you’ll struggle a bit at first before understanding it. Omaraha is also the only P2P platform I know that doesn’t provide tax reports.

Documentation

Well, there’s an “Investing help” section, I can’t deny it. Unfortunately it’s totally useless, so investors are basically left alone understanding how things work.

Communication & support

Omaraha is overall quiet. In addition, nearly all e-mails are in Estonian only, so most of us won’t understand them.

Important changes such as the warranty fund’s mechanism aren’t announced by e-mail, only on the forums. It’s thus important to check these from time to time – the messages volume is low so it won’t take much time -.

Official Omaraha pages on social networks

Support

Finally one positive aspect ! I’ve been in touch with the support twice and their answers were quick and helpful. There’s also an English forum which you can use for general questions.

Actual performance of my Omaraha portfolio

18,66%

At the end of July 2022, the XIRR for my Omaraha portfolio was 18,66%.

Although Omaraha is by far the worst platform I know in terms of user experience, there''s no denying that the performance of this portfolio is excellent. For consumer loans, it''s the undisputed #1 platform !

Don't hesitate to read my most recent crowdlending portfolio review for detailed platforms performance comparison as well as historical performance.

For a detailed comparison of the different p2p-lending marketplaces, check out this article.

Portfolio creation date

I created my Omaraha portfolio in November 2016

Omaraha's main competitors

Omaraha's facts & figures

Location

Haapsalu, Estonia

Loans amount financed

€87,756,000

As of November 2020

Who can invest at Omaraha

Investor – a person of at least 18 years of age who resides permanently in Estonia or in another European Union country who has a valid identity document (passport or ID-card) issued in said country and who has signed the general Investment Terms through the Portal’s Investment Account. An Investor may also be a legal person if granting credit is not its principal commercial, economic, or professional activity and the granting of credit to a natural person is not deemed consumer credit under the law of the Borrower’s country of residence.

Omaraha Terms Of Service

In conclusion...

Because of its terribly dated website and lack of transparency, it's hard to recommend Omaraha anymore.

Disclosure

Please note that this review may contain affiliate links. It means that I will earn a commission if you decide to invest after clicking through the link – at no additional cost to you, of course -. Please understand that I have experienced all of these companies, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the commissions I make if you decide to invest through my links.

13 thoughts on “Omaraha review”

    • Hi,

      I’ve been a FinBee investor for a while but I never got around to writing a review as the number of options for auto-invest felt overwhelming. Now that they simplified it, I resumed writing the review. Overall I like the platform, but my returns are a bit deceiving (12.65% XIRR); I should probably use more aggressive auto-invest settings !

      Reply
  1. Hi Jerome,

    first of all, thanks for all the usefull information. Compliments to your website!

    My experience with Omaraha are rather dreadfull. I have invested through 10 other platforms but the registration process to become a new user on Omaraha are totally crap.
    I registered, transfered small amount of money (for the identification process), and soon after that I could not log in anymore.
    Also clicking on the request link for resetting the password did not work. Omaraha keeps saying the problem lies with my email program (Outlook). No emails show up in my spam box though. It is the first platform that I encounter with such a shitty enrollment process.
    Does anybody else have the same experience?

    Regards
    JP

    Reply
    • Many thanks to you for the compliment ! If I understand correctly, you managed to log on initially (in order to get the transfer references), then you were unable to login anymore, right ?

      Reply
      • Correct, I managed to register initially, then made a identification bank transfer of EUR1,-.
        Couple of days after I was not able to log on anymore, nor did the password resetting process of Omaraha work.
        Emailed a couple of times. They stated that their system has sent a password reset link email, but nothing showed up in my inbox nor spamfilter.
        So emailed to the helpdesk again and they changed my initial email address with an alternative email address that I have provided them with. But, lo and behold, nothing happened here also. The same problem keeps existing.
        I am so fed up with their crappy platform that I have asked them to terminate my account and transfer my fund back to my banking account.

        Reply
  2. Hei Jerome,

    I recently registered in Omaraha. I see that you can open and investment account in Slovakia, Finland and Estonia. But also a “secured investment account” in Estonia. Do you know what makes this one account different from the others? Is it only for the Fully secured loans
    Thanks

    Reply
    • Secured loans have a 100% buyback guarantee (actually it’s closer to a “payment guarantee”, as the monthly repayment are guaranteed to happen on time). Unfortunately the interest rates aren’t interesting.

      Currently the best choice for Omaraha’s loans seems to be Estonian loans; I invest in the highest-rated loans yielding 34% gross, which is slight less than 24% net. Eventhough the buyback guarantee is only partial, my XIRR is slightly below 20% and is very stable !

      Reply
      • I’m having problems understanding the site. I’m in the Estonian loans page, I have saldo in my estonian ccount. When I put the amount I want to invest, i put the verification code and then I’m sent back to the loans list. The investment has not gone through. Do you send yourself a new verification code everytime you invest in a loan?

        Reply
        • Are you trying to invest manually (on the “Loan applications” page), or through auto-invest (“investment terms” page) ? In the latter page, investments aren’t immediate; actually last week my auto-invest nearly didn’t invest anything. I usually set the interest rate 1% below the max value (displayed using the “Offers” button), which currently means 34% gross for the highest-rated Estonian loans.

          Reply
    • Hi Steve,

      As far as I know, they don’t have an affiliate program. Before you sign up there, make sure you have enough aspirin available 🙂

      Reply
  3. Hello,

    I want to withdraw some funds but their sms function doesn’t work anymore. I’ve been waiting for 10 days now.

    Reply

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