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Kimmo there’s already a lot of European P2P platforms. What is the gap in the market you are hoping to fill?
P2P investing has been broken for some time, and retail investors have lost a lot of money due to platforms that don’t take investor security seriously. What we did with Income Marketplace is combine our experience from non-bank lending and institutional loan investments and implemented this into a new type of P2P marketplace where investor security is the priority.
All 3 co-founders were involved with a lender that used to appear on Mintos – Aasa/Supernova. What did you learn from that experience?
We did a lot of fundraising in Aasa/Supernova and this is where we learned how the large institutions that invest into loans like Fortress Investment Group and others do their due diligence and secure their investments. We took these learnings and implemented them into Income with the goal of making investing into loans secure also for the retail investor.
You also co-founded an Indonesian Fintech in 2014. Tell us more about that. How big is it now?
Tunaiku is the first digital instalment loan in Indonesia and is the flagship product of local Bank Amar. Amar has core capital of about 70 million USD and is the first digital bank in Indonesia. It IPO’d in early 2020 and is listed on the Jakarta stock exchange. It has been a great success and continues on a strong growth path. I have no operational involvement anymore but I’m still a member of its steering committee. Indonesia as a market has a lot of potential due to its young and large population.
Your biggest innovation seems to be obtaining the right for a standby servicer to take over collection of repayments. To do that successfully they need to have up to date contact information and payment details for each customer. How does that work?
Income Marketplace always has up to date information available on each loan and the data is shared weekly with the backup service providers. We always know the real status of the loan and can track the borrower repayments in detail as our system mirrors the system of the loan originator. Mintos for example does not know what payments came from which borrower to which loan, which I find incredible as a P2P investor.
But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. The real innovation here is bringing the institutional level security into P2P. Taking the loan portfolio as real security and setting the Cashflow Buffer enables us to recover the investor funds in case there is an LO default. This is something that is only available on Income Marketplace and was built to address the disastrous situations we’ve witnessed (e.g. on Mintos in 2020).
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