Twino CEO Jevgenijs Kazanins stepping down

This was in investor newsletter, repost below.
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Dear kilo,

This month we have reached an important milestone, EUR 200 000 000 in loans funded through TWINO Investment Platform. This autumn also marked the second anniversary of my tenure as TWINO Investment Platform Lead, so I believe it’s a great moment to reflect on the things we have achieved together to date, and share what’s ahead of us.

We have grown to one of the leading peer-to-peer lenders in Continental Europe in terms of both monthly and total volume of loans funded through the platform;
We have opened new, previously inaccessible, markets for European P2P investors, including, Georgia, Russia and Kazakhstan that allow investors earning premium returns;
We have built a 10,000+ member community of loyal investors, who have believed in our vision from the early days and continue to support our development;
And, most importantly, despite the rapid growth of origination volumes, we have consistently delivered double-digit returns to investors, or 11.79% p.a. to be precise.

We are happy with the results we have achieved with your support to date; however, we do not plan to stop here, and set the following goals for the upcoming year:

Further grow our origination volumes in order to achieve a consistent monthly level of EUR 15-20 million, while maintaining profitability;
Maintain existing profitability level for investors by focusing our resources on the emerging markets that provide premium returns, such Russia and Kazakhstan;
Continue exploring and testing new markets and lending products, both in Europe, as well as in Asia, in order to satisfy the growing demand from investors;
Strengthen our team to provide even better user experience and service for both, the borrowers and investors that we serve.

Our plans are ambitious; however, I am confident that the team, that we have built over the years, is well positioned to execute on those with excellence. Therefore, I will be stepping down from daily operations of TWINO Platform, and my role will be taken over by Roberts Lasovskis. Over the last year, Roberts has been in touch with most of our investors; thus, he genuinely understands our challenges and has the necessary experience to lead further growth of TWINO Platform.

Sincerely,

Jevgenijs Kazanins

P2P Platform Lead

on behalf of the TWINO team

It's hard to judge/ analyze at this point, we'll just have to see if Twino improves or whether it's time for an exit strategy

Having followed the subject reasonably closely, based on public info, my takeaway is:
- Jevgenijs was a decent business development guy / ex-startuper, a relatively expensive employee
- he led build-up of the Twino platform as a financing tool for Finabay/Twino group, solely or majority owned by a smart fellow called Armands Broks
- the platform has matured and achieved what possible of its goals, to provide a needed scale of relatively cheap funding (10% p.a. as stated average in newsletters) for the group
- limited platform options for growth - can't get cheaper than 10% p.a., investors are stupid but not that stupid, no need for more investors as Twino is not able to rapidly grow loanbook. So it is basically just maintaining the status quo, for now.
- no real point in such circumstances to keep there an expansive busdev asset, so assume Jevgenijs simply got bored and left to do something more challenging. Or maybe Armands wanted to cut the fixed cost.

I think that if Twino went bad (a la Eurocent style) tomorrow, I would rather be holding on to the loans where the borrowers have already paid off half of a 12 month loan than hold a bunch of 1 month loads with a 35% buyback rate. Also, at the moment, it is a lot easier to sell old 12-13% loans than new 10% ones regardless of the loan period.

Something shady happened they are trying to cover up.

Either that, or the CEO realized Twino is going to and is bailing. I've seen this happen to few other startups in the past.