We finally get to the final post of the year, and what a year 2018 has been! At the end of 2017, this blog and DS were only having baby steps. Although our ambitions are for much higher flights, there were a few accomplishments that we should be proud of, and some self-imposed challenges going forward. Before that, however, let us quickly go through the usual FinTech review, the last investment made this year through the platform PeerBerry.
Maybe it’s the experience kicking in, but unfortunately our first perception of platform and what they advertise were not as impressive as we would have liked. Nonetheless, PeerBerry does offer significant returns and loans to borrowers in some countries that we have little exposure to, so worth our trial run.
PeerBerry’s main advantages
- Simple registration procedure to join PeerBerry, it didn’t take long nor was it too energy consuming;
- Expanding our diversification in Eastern Europe, this platform has plenty of loans in Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania;
- Loans are generally guaranteed by the platform itself. As we discussed in this other post (second disadvantage mentioned on Mintos post) this shifts what we are actually financing, but does help mitigate risk in a first contact with the platform;
- Decent interest rates, 10% p.a. loans are abundant and the investor can even find higher interests with a quick search;
- Auto-invest functionality is quite decent, I had only half of the original investment on it but quickly migrated all to auto-invest, making up for a disadvantage mentioned below regarding selection of individual loans.
Pain points
- Low range of interest rates suggests the loans are very similar amongst themselves;
- Small number of platforms and countries where they lend, for investors who want to pick the destination of their investment, check you’re ok with these countries before you put money in;
- Search mechanism to filter investments to choose from on the platform lacks, other FinTechs allow for instance to filter one platform out and keep all others and offer more varied search criteria;
- As we experienced before there is a difficulty in noticing this platform’s competitive advantage, something really setting it aside the competitors. Some of the aspects they highlight on their website – such as verified and experienced platforms – not only should be a given but also contradict the fact they have a link shortly after inviting new loan originators. Of course, the beginning of any platform involves trying to grow in many directions and selling yourself as best as you can, but this one just didn’t seem to be an actual highlight.
Financials
- Initial investment amount of 1000 Euros, lately all allocated to auto-invest exclusively for guaranteed loans;
- Interest rates were averaging 9,32% annualy but should have been higher if I had quickly reinvested the first batch of hand-picked loans.
As the year finishes we don’t want to miss the opportunity to thank all those who contributed or read any or all of our 29 posts this year! We’ve reviewed ten platforms through which we have our own money invested in, and hope you can take advantage of our lessons shared through this channel. Some other tests were less successful such as the events page on this website, this is probably going to be replaced soon with something useful for a wider public, and less demanding in terms of time to update.
Also, it’s always a good time to think about what we want for the future. I believe in the fields of finance, technology and also others, nothing is as much of a clear sign of success than growth, so we want to increase our invested funds and keep our transparency policy. In terms of the way we post, it would be great to start also making voice content available, and who knows maybe also video. Also increasing your participation is key for us, so please get in touch with what would particularly interest you, or if you want help navigating the FinTechs you know more or less about.
That’s it from us in 2018, as we say in Germany have a good “Rutsch” in the new year and come back for more FinTech!