Mintos & Baltic States platforms board?

Yes, Euro platforms rather than Baltic States would be an interesting alternative. The reason I didn't go for that was that it's some of the Baltic States ones that appear to have the most interesting propositions, more so than the broader Eurozone group. The currency is a pretty key difference to risk that would be a good justification for either.

It appears also that they are going to close (sunset I assume means close) the secondary market that provides an exit route from investments. Hopefully they will give years of advance notice so the existing product we invested in is not changed dramatically for the worse on us for existing investments.

Partel's reply to the legal structure blog post is also of great interest:

"Bondora will continue to operate a loan-based crowd-funding platform. The structure we used was not similar to other platforms regulated by FCA. Now it’s more uniform. The structure is modelled based on US asset-backed securities investment industry standards. The key benefits of the new model are: (1) companies can buy these assets, (2) we can set up a backup servicer to manage portfolio administration in case of our default, and (3) potential to securitise the assets. First adds liquidity, second reduces operational risks and third makes it easier and more tax efficient for investors to buy the loans (e.g. packaged as a bond).

We have analysed the legislation in all loan countries to make sure it works. Lender country specific taxation and compliance has not been analysed."

In effect Bondora appears to be planning to abandon the core f the product that attracted existing investors and move somewhat in the direction Zopa took some years ago that caused it to become uninteresting, but going even further and perhaps faster in that direction. Anyone who's much familiar with P2P will know that his claims 1 and 2 aren't different and securitisation has also happened via packages of loans on many platforms. Doesn't seem to be in touch with even the existing P2P market in the UK.

Not paying attention to country things means that I suppose we have to forget any idea of Bondora being usable inside an ISA, making it hopelessly uncompetitive for UK investors who won't have income tax to pay on investments in other platforms that are.

Great opportunity here for Mintos and others.

This bit from the newsletter is also interesting: "Please remember that although investors have earned more than 10% average return after fees and bad debts on Bondora". 10% is too low to be of interest for British investors, I think, who can quite easily get secured lending at rates that high and above without exchange rate risk.

The loan statistics for the last six months with 10k invested are also quite interesting on the returns table with only 38% getting.a return of 20% or more even though that time is too recent for there to be many defaults. Not a good sign given default rates and the number of investors who've been invested longer than six months who will be dragging the numbers up. But it's the investment quality per month at the bottom that may be most interesting and may explain why Bondora are doing things. Look at the change from August 2014 to August 2015 and see that it's effectively flat. It appears that Bondora may have upset retail investors to the point that they can no longer grow using them and are perhaps making a move to try to attract new money from institutional lenders to replace what they have scared off with results, changes and communication on the retail side.

Also worth remembering that the chart and results are made to look better by some significant Bondora practices:

1. Issuing and repaying loans that haven't even been given, boosts the apparent volume of new lending and also reduces the percentage of defaults and how big they look in the pictures. I suppose that this practice is the only reason for the big increase in total loan amount shown in July 2015.
2. For defaulted loans, only counting as defaulted the amounts not paid so far, ignoring the rest of the loan value.
3. Rescheduling loans to interest only or no payments at all for long periods instead of counting them as defaulted and also presumably as for defaulted loans only reporting the amount missed so far, not the whole loan value. Many of these also have ended up being shown as "on time" instead of "overdue" to investors online.

With them trying to hire a person to promote in New York it doesn't look good for the retail side, particularly given changes that are moving more to the style of some US platforms, where retail investors are shafted (get lower returns than) institutional investors who use fully automated full time tools to get the better deals.

What'll be really interesting as well is whether the corporates will do lots of due diligence and also be scared off by Bondora's history or not. It could be a big hill for their corporate sales people to climb.

James,I couldn't agree more.Twino and Mintos do appear to more reliable ,more user friendly and innovative .Yields are good and many with a buy back.
Of course the guarantor could crash and burn,but so far ,so good.Also,and perhaps more important, they both have plans to move bases to London and conform with our more stringent rules and regs.I will chase up this Forums regulators and Administrators if you advise me how to do so.
Well said.Best Regards,David

Hmm,jolly good.Hope my emails helped.