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Post by webbski9 on Nov 9, 2015 14:12:49 GMT
Fellow Investors. Have a look at Fellow Finance as a alternative to Twino and Mintos. Based in Finland and recently opened to other European countries it offers many different loan types,rates and maturity. The website is easy to negotiate and communication with their Head of Investor Relations, Antoni Airikkala , are extremely efficient and swift. Investor rates of up to 28% are available with a variety of risk categories .Whilst there are no Buy-Back guarantees ,90 days after a default FF engage with a Recovery Agent and repay 70% of capital. Happy Viewing
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JamesFrance
Member of DD Central
Port Grimaud 1974
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Post by JamesFrance on Nov 9, 2015 15:53:35 GMT
Thanks, sounds interesting but after a high level of defaults for Finnish loans at Bondora I am not sure I would be ready to risk more loans there, although they may well be much better at assessing the lenders.
Certainly one to watch now there is an English version.
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shimself
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Post by shimself on Dec 10, 2015 9:38:21 GMT
I'm getting tempted, has anyone gone before me?
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shimself
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Post by shimself on Dec 10, 2015 13:19:59 GMT
I have nosed around some more
They say we are likely to get around 14% net return
The borrowers are individuals in Finland, it's €uros which suits me. The loan amounts I have seen are 500-5K, interest rates typically high 20s (eg 28%), terms 2-5years, so, sorry to say it, rather like Bondora's borrowers. I haven't yet found the buyback guarantee words, just some blurb: In case of borrower defaulting his loan, the loss is capped to 30% of the capital.
I struggle with high interest rate loans, partly because I feel for the borrowers, partly because efficient recovery is going to matter a lot as the borrowers must have pretty poor credit ratings if they have to pay that high a rate, and partly because I think of how Wonga got legislated against and had to write off a load of loans and so on, and how the same might reasonably happen in Finland (ok it's not payday lending but it is a next door neighbour)
The website works quite well, there are sudden bits of Finnish language popping up (which Google can translate), and some jargon which has got me foxed (valid until 10pv anyone?). The sorting on the website doesn't work at all, shades of TC, and it has a habit of reverting to the finnish language pages.
The management seem a distinct cut above Bondora (I keep kicking myself for not having kept away for that reason), and they are owned by a publically listed finance outfit Taaleritehdas Plc, with €4Bn under management.
A couple of days ago they opened up to Japanese investors (!?).
erm oooh I'm desperate for €uros platforms but desparate isn't a good reason. dunno...
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homes119
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Post by homes119 on Dec 11, 2015 10:33:44 GMT
I have nosed around some more They say we are likely to get around 14% net return The borrowers are individuals in Finland, it's €uros which suits me. The loan amounts I have seen are 500-5K, interest rates typically high 20s (eg 28%), terms 2-5years, so, sorry to say it, rather like Bondora's borrowers. I haven't yet found the buyback guarantee words, just some blurb: In case of borrower defaulting his loan, the loss is capped to 30% of the capital.I struggle with high interest rate loans, partly because I feel for the borrowers, partly because efficient recovery is going to matter a lot as the borrowers must have pretty poor credit ratings if they have to pay that high a rate, and partly because I think of how Wonga got legislated against and had to write off a load of loans and so on, and how the same might reasonably happen in Finland (ok it's not payday lending but it is a next door neighbour) The website works quite well, there are sudden bits of Finnish language popping up (which Google can translate), and some jargon which has got me foxed ( valid until 10pv anyone?). The sorting on the website doesn't work at all, shades of TC, and it has a habit of reverting to the finnish language pages. The management seem a distinct cut above Bondora (I keep kicking myself for not having kept away for that reason), and they are owned by a publically listed finance outfit Taaleritehdas Plc, with €4Bn under management. A couple of days ago they opened up to Japanese investors (!?). erm oooh I'm desperate for €uros platforms but desparate isn't a good reason. dunno... Same, i'm EU based and also looking for euro platforms. Got out of Bondora with a decent return (I was very conservative and glad I was). I've started looking at French platforms (i'm not based in France because otherwise it would be a heavy tax burden). Have you looked at Unilend, Lendix and Prêt d'Union? sites are in French though...
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shimself
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Post by shimself on Dec 12, 2015 14:13:17 GMT
Same, i'm EU based and also looking for euro platforms. Got out of Bondora with a decent return (I was very conservative and glad I was). I've started looking at French platforms (i'm not based in France because otherwise it would be a heavy tax burden). Have you looked at Unilend, Lendix and Prêt d'Union? sites are in French though... I am in France with erm adequate French Unilend - a bargepole isn't long enough no q&a unhappy lenders on french savers forum dodgy average return figures nuff said Pret d Union - kind of going off it because they keep talking about improving their borrower selection. 4-5% say in comp to a 3-4% Assurance vie with guarantees and possible tax advantages Lendix - no q&a no thanks Wiseed - ish
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Post by gusgorilla on Jan 16, 2016 0:55:03 GMT
I'm signing up right now.
An incredible amount of info about borrowers, their incoming, outgoings etcetera and the stats very detailed. Not much background info on some slightly confusing bits of the very feature packed interface. PV means days BTW.The auto lend is fiendishly complex. I feel if I could get to grips with all this stuff it could allow me to make some quite fine grained judgements. Definitely one for the geeks.
My son is a software developer and lives in Finland wit his Finish girlfriend. I will ask them to translate any tutorials etc they can find in Finland and pass on anything useful they find out.
If anybody finds out anything in the mean time please post.
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ablender
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Post by ablender on Jan 16, 2016 14:33:37 GMT
What about UK based investors? How will this work, especially from the tax and regulation point of view?
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Post by gusgorilla on Jan 21, 2016 3:26:49 GMT
You are taxed as if the money was made in your home country, Britain in my case too. On a UK self assessment put it on in euros in the foreign earnings section. No idea how they decide what exchange rate to use.
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Post by gusgorilla on Jan 28, 2016 0:57:25 GMT
Have my first 1K on there now. Nice interface but slow. Their man there said they are going to get more powerful hardware soon. Both folk spoke excellent English which is typical of Finns. The stereotype of the Finns is that they are very highly educated, friendly but people of very few words. This describes the website perfectly.
Love their autoinvestors (you can create different ones, with their own budgets and run them all at once) and the site has tons of useful features. If you're a geek like me you'll love it.
First snag is there seem to be very few loans available in the primary market. However autoinvestors get first bite so the great majority of loans never reach it because they are fully invested by allocators. My autoinvestor (allocator) has not managed to buy anything yet but I am hoping this is because no new loans have been put on in the last few hours. The system is a reverse auction so the less happy alternative explanation is that I have set my interest levels too high to win any auctions. An even more unhappy possibility is that loan volumes are low. We shall see.
More to follow.
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james
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Post by james on Jan 28, 2016 2:36:47 GMT
You are taxed as if the money was made in your home country, Britain in my case too. On a UK self assessment put it on in euros in the foreign earnings section. No idea how they decide what exchange rate to use. Until the total amount of foreign interest is over £2,000 you put it in the domestic untaxed interest section and add a note saying how much is foreign in the notes at the end of the return, according to the tax return instructions. If the amount is over £2,000 you put the interest paid by borrowers (or platform if lending is direct to the platform) in each country on a different line in the foreign interest section of the foreign pages and make no domestic entry or note. You decide what exchange rate to use. Your choice must be reasonable. So said HMRC foreign income people during a phone call in which they declined to be more prescriptive than that, though arbitrary changes during or between years that do nothing but achieve a tax saving would not be reasonable. What I have been doing is calculations with annual average, monthly average ( HMRC for duty, or Banque de France) and daily ECB rates, reporting the daily rate version to HMRC. Links take you to a source of each of those. Whether the exact rate choice matters much will depend on the fluctuations in exchange rate and interest payments over the year. If you have only a few hundred Pounds of interest the difference between annual and daily rates isn't likely to matter much unless most of it was at the end of the year after a big rate change. Even in that case, remember that amounts are rounded down to the nearest £10 so it's not particularly likely to matter in many cases when the amounts are in the hundreds. To give you some idea, here's how my calculated interest changed for each method in 2014-15: Annual average: 100% Monthly averages: 103.43% Daily averages: 101.75% That 3.43% would have been under £10 and largely irrelevant to the tax calculation up to almost £300 of interest. It's a little fiddly to set up the rate lookup based on the day of transactions initially but once it's done it's easy enough to just keep on reusing the lookup calculation. Unlikely to be hard to get someone here to explain how to do lookups if needed. Also remember one of the most important tax return deadline rules: get in an estimated return if you can't get it all done and use the notes to say what's estimated. This way you will avoid the late return penalties and can correct as time allows. I did an estimated return for last tax year in April and HMRC haven't even sent me 31 Jan reminders because I've already filed a decent estimated return with a clear description of what was estimated.
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Post by gusgorilla on Jan 28, 2016 3:28:24 GMT
Thank you very much james. That information is gold.
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ders
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Post by ders on Feb 9, 2016 19:11:22 GMT
They lowered interest for loans. A bit less interesting now
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Post by gusgorilla on Feb 11, 2016 0:32:31 GMT
Just a quick update on my progress.
I had a few days where my autobidder didn't seem to do anything. Their guy Antoni soon sorted me out. It seems I have two accounts and had to transfer money between them. This is not clear from the interface and I'm not sure why, but I suspect every new autobidder creates a new account. There's an FAQ in progress which may help with this sort of thing.
Once I transferred money between accounts the autobidder picked up loans well over the next day or two using rates for different loan classes I had set based on what they were showing as current averages. It is a reverse auction with nothing being reserved for manual bidders. The only loans that reach the manual bidding list are ones where the borrower has specified a rate too low for the autobidders to be interested.
There is a fiendishly complex secondary market which I cannot yet understand. You can set your autobidder to buy from that too, with a few options of how to do so.
They rate people between one and five stars and clearly show expected and actual losses on your portfolio screen. A two star person is paying 24% gross right now and a four star 19%. Only people with a completely clean credit record are accepted so the stars are based on demographics, income and expenditure etc. A default means you get 70% of the remaining outstanding capital from the debt being sold on to collectors. All payments are flat capital and interest over the duration of the loan.
The loans are 1 year, 18 months, 2 years, 3 years or 5 years. All unsecured personal loans. Too many are at the longer times for my current tastes.
There is reasonable loan flow but it turned to a tiny trickle when I set my autobidder to loan periods two years or less. My guess is volumes would be insufficient for large investors right now. I am still not fully invested and do not expect to be for several more days and I only have 1250 Euros, which I want to get into 50 loans.
There are one or two translations I don't quite get and a few of the tool tips are still in Finnish. I intend to go through a few things with their guy Antoni again when I get time.
A very fully featured and interesting platform with lots of great data. Some supporting documentation would help open it to the masses. Worth considering if you use other Eurozone platforms and do not need to invest very large sums, particularly if you have a euros bank account to avoid currency fees.
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Post by gusgorilla on Feb 12, 2016 23:03:36 GMT
I was wrong about it taking several more days to fully invest in loans two years or less. It only took today.
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