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Post by spartacu5 on Feb 17, 2018 23:11:09 GMT
Anyone with experience from Fellow Finance? Rates of return? Loan liquidity? Finnish platform but open to international investors.
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Post by buttchopf23 on Feb 17, 2018 23:29:05 GMT
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Post by wiseclerk on Feb 17, 2018 23:31:23 GMT
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Post by spartacu5 on Feb 17, 2018 23:37:24 GMT
Thank you! This forum is a gold mine.
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Post by amoult on Sept 27, 2018 10:00:03 GMT
FF is becoming a publicly listed company. IPO started today and they're looking for 10 MEUR funding to fuel expansion to new countries. Company will be listed to Nasdaq First North marketplace. Company has shown good revenue growth with healthy profit (2017-2018e EBIT-% 29-27 %). I've been investing couple of years via their platform and consider this as a good development. More transparency and good growth plan. I might even participate the IPO myself
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zedi
Member of DD Central
Posts: 80
Likes: 47
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Post by zedi on Sept 27, 2018 13:15:38 GMT
Company has shown good revenue growth with healthy profit (2017-2018e EBIT-% 29-27 %). I've been investing couple of years via their platform and consider this as a good development. More transparency and good growth plan. I also started lending via Fellow Finance 2,5 yrs ago and so far I´ve been quite happy with it. Until recently, Fellow Finance gave me the highest net returns of all of my p2p-investments but then the interest rates were dropping rapidly some month ago (of course, one cannot expect such high net returns don´t lure more and more lenders). I am still happy with the returns, however I am not so sure whether the IPO will be a good thing for us lenders: Since Fellow Finance doesn´t avoid conflicts of interst with it´s fee structure (fees are paid upfront, a common bad practice in the p2p-industry), there is a high risk of "window dressing" to deliver good quaterly results. It´s very easy to hand out money, the hard part is to get it back and since Fellow Finance also earns money when loans default and lenders lose money, they could succumb to the temptation and originate some more (bad) loans to show growth before the next quaterly results are due...
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Post by amoult on Sept 28, 2018 4:55:13 GMT
Yeah I agree to some degree, but it's a business model built on trust and they do report default rates per market. Sure one can crank up loan volumes to get a good quarter, but if you burn your investors badly enough ..then there won't be any funding on the long run. One interesting point in IPO material; they also operate a subsidiary company 'Lainaamo' which then acts as an investor on FF platform.. so they do have some skin in the game.
They especially mentioned that Lainaamo is needed when they open market in a new country and not many investors want to step in day 1.
They seem to have a very light structure ~30 persons only. I guess that explains good profitability which not many growing P2p companies can't say. However it's a bit worrying that their IT department and platform development consist of only four guys!
One falls ill and another leaves company and they're pretty much screwed.. also I'd say they'd need some fresh coding talent as their platform seem to perform a bit sluggishly and have some errors every now and then. Albeit it's got a bit better over time..
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zedi
Member of DD Central
Posts: 80
Likes: 47
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Post by zedi on Sept 28, 2018 19:30:15 GMT
Yeah I agree to some degree, but it's a business model built on trust and they do report default rates per market. Sure one can crank up loan volumes to get a good quarter, but if you burn your investors badly enough ..then there won't be any funding on the long run. One interesting point in IPO material; they also operate a subsidiary company 'Lainaamo' which then acts as an investor on FF platform.. so they do have some skin in the game. They especially mentioned that Lainaamo is needed when they open market in a new country and not many investors want to step in day 1. They seem to have a very light structure ~30 persons only. I guess that explains good profitability which not many growing P2p companies can't say. However it's a bit worrying that their IT department and platform development consist of only four guys! One falls ill and another leaves company and they're pretty much screwed.. also I'd say they'd need some fresh coding talent as their platform seem to perform a bit sluggishly and have some errors every now and then. Albeit it's got a bit better over time.. It´s all about trust with these fintech-companies but not all think farer than the next funding round... Yes, they do publish default rates etc. but they don´t let you download the full loanbook and their numbers are skewed due to the rapid growth... I also studied the IPO material (https://www.evli.com/en/theme/Fellow-Finance-Plc-initial-public-offering.html) and it´s really interesting to read (not only for those interested in becoming shareholders but also for everyone who wants to gain more knowlegde about p2p-lending). I found the graph "Operating expenses, % of facilitated financing volume" very interesting since it´s a rare occasion that one gets to know how much money from the (sometimes ridiculously) high fees is really needed for the operation of the platform. Lainaamo was also new to me but good to know. It´s nothing wrong with investing in their own loans as long as they invest under the same conditions as all the other lenders (i.e. don´t use insider infos to arbitrage the SM) but I wished they would make such infos available on their website. Considering the rapid growth and profitability, the valuation doesn´t seem to be very high. After all I agree that Fellow Finance shares could be a good investment.
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Post by amoult on Jan 9, 2019 7:20:25 GMT
At the end I decided not to participate in IPO as valuation was too tight for me. However now I bought some Fellow Finance common stock as the price dropped almost 20% below IPO price for a short period during the December market madness Price has recovered nicely in January. Company publishes 2018 financials in 14.2.2019 so we shall see if I bought gold or . At least loan volumes show steady growth and they have always been very profitable for a growth company, so I have high hopes. This is a nice thing about publicly listed companies. They are forced to publish numbers on agreed schedule. One can only wish such information was available for all platforms and loan originators.
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Post by spaaps on Jan 9, 2019 13:38:27 GMT
I sold my stock shares and have done the same for loans in FF-platform. No buyback and the final price of the late loand dropped now aslo.
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