A Viventor review after 2 years

Two years ago, I decided to give Viventor a try and deposited my first 100 EUR into my account. What drew me into the platform were high interest rates, up to 15%, buyback and payment guarantee policies.

At a first glance, ignoring the website’s yellow theme, it just looks like a mini version of Mintos. The same primary and secondary markets, the same auto-invest, even some of the loan originators were the same. After a full year on the platform, I can still see similarities, but also lots of subtle differences.

How does Viventor work

Viventor is a lending marketplace that acts as an intermediary between loan originators across Europe and retail investors. It makes money by charging loan originators a small fee on top of the interest rate offered to investors.

The loan originators are European lending companies offering all sorts of loans: consumer loans, business loans, invoice financing, lines of credit, mortgage-backed loans.

The loan amounts range from a few 1000s EUR to 100.000+ EUR. The interest rates range from 6% to 16%, while the loan terms can go from a few months up to 7 years.

The loan originators offer on most of their loans a buyback guarantee, meaning they’ll pay back investors their invested principal plus the accrued interest in case the borrowers are late with their payments by more than 30, 60, or 90 days. The buyback guarantee terms are different for each loan originator, and you can check them on Viventor’s loan originators page.

In case a borrower defaults, if the loan was covered by a buyback guarantee, the loan originator will pay back the accrued interest and principal to the investors. For loans not covered by a buyback guarantee, but secured by a mortgage, the loan originator will handle the funds’ recovery and then pay back the investors.

If a loan originator defaults or has problems with paying their debt, Viventor acts on behalf of their investors and handles communication with the loan originator.

In case Viventor defaults, an administrator takes over Viventor’s operations and ensures the current investments are settled.

A more in-depth look at Viventor

Viventor launched its operations in 2015 and since then, it managed to fund loans worth over 130 million EUR. Out of these loans, more than 80% have been consumer loans, 13% invoice financing, and around 5% business loans. The number of loans available on the primary and secondary markets is far from Mintos’s figures, but there are always around 10.000 – 30.000 loans available on both of these markets.

There are currently around 7000 investors on the platform, and judging by Viventor’s statistics page, their average annual return is around 14%. At the end of 2018, they had around 5000 investors on the platform, so a 30% increase in numbers is not too bad. However, Viventor doesn’t disclose if these 7000 are actual investors or just dormant accounts, so numbers can be deceiving.

In 2016, they funded loans worth a bit over 13 million EUR. In 2017, 19 million EUR, in 2018, 31 million EUR, in 2019, over 50 million EUR. It seemed the platform was growing at a healthy rate. But then 2020 came, with only 20 million EUR in funded loans, and a general decrease in investments across all the p2p lending market.

Company details

Viventor started a partnership in 2016 with Finstar Financial Group, a Russian private investment fund focused on fintech startups. This partnership (and consequent funding) allowed Viventor to grow and expand its operations.

There’s not much information about the number of employees Viventor has but looking at their opened positions they seem to have a software development team in Barcelona, besides their office in Riga. The company’s key people are the following:

• Andrius Bolšaitis – CEO, since July 2019; he replaced Toms Niparts, who started his own lending platform, Jeff
• Raivis Palmakovskis – Head of Product Development, who also worked at Nordea and Twino
• Dainis Ābeltiņš – Investor Success Manager, which I’ve no idea what it means, but it sounds just like a fancy name for customer support

Becoming an investor

You need to have a bank account in the European Economic Area in order to register on the website and invest. The KYC process involves asking for a passport copy and a utility bill.

To fund my account, I’m using Revolut. This is mainly because my local currency is not EUR and Revolut offers the best currency conversion rates on the market. Other payment platforms like Transferwise should work too.

How safe are my investments

Two years ago, the buyback guarantee on my loans was enough to make me feel safe enough to invest. As I got more experience with p2p lending, my focus started to shift a bit from the high returns to how safe is a platform to invest in and what are the risks involved.

As with any p2p lending platform, there’s a risk involved that your money will be lost. This being said, Viventor does offer some protective measures for its investors.

Platform risks

Viventor doesn’t disclose yet their financial statements, so it’s hard to get any warnings in case they go bankrupt. In the (currently) unlikely case Viventor defaults, an insolvency administrator will take over its operations and will ensure the settlement of outstanding investments. Since the loans offered on the platform are between investors and loan originators, your funds should still be secure.

Viventor also says they value data security and use a certified auditor service to back up their investment data on a monthly basis.

One thing missing from the platform is 2-factor authentication, so for now investor accounts are protected only by a password. Luckily, you can only withdraw funds to a verified bank account, so any potential attacker won’t be able to empty your account.

Loan originator risks

Viventor acts as an intermediary between loan originators (lending companies) and investors. The buyback guarantee on the loans is covered by the loan originators, so here is the main risk when investing with Viventor.

Viventor says it’s doing audits on all the lending companies it adds to the site, looking periodically at their financials. The first problem I’ve noticed was with Aforti Finance. When they stopped sending their interest payments, Viventor added a nice warning on all Aforti loans available on the primary and secondary market, warning investors about the current state and risks involved.

Performance risks

Most of the loans come with a buyback guarantee but the platform also has unsecured loans. If they default, your returns will be a lot lower than expected. Even with secured loans, not all buyback guarantees are created equal. Some loan originators offer buyback guarantee after 30 days of delays, others after 90 days. While in the long term, the slight delays on the returns won’t be visible anymore, in the short-term they will affect your monthly returns.

Liquidity risks

Viventor does have a secondary market, but in some cases, you might not be able to sell your investment there. Low interest rates, Aforti loans, high buyback guarantee period, can lower the liquidity of your investments.

Platform experience

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From a functionality standpoint, Viventor has everything needed for a crowdlending platform:

• A primary market with currently issued loans
• A secondary market where investors can sell their investments
• a decent auto-invest tool with enough settings to filter out loans you don’t want to invest in
• an account statement where you can also export your tax report
• a decent dashboard with current balance, returns, portfolio details, and expected cash flows
• the ability to export your data in an excel file so you can process it outside the platform

Auto-invest

One of the things I’m looking for in a p2p lending site is if they have or not an auto-invest tool.

Since the minimum investment amount in a loan is 10 EUR, I do want to take advantage of that and spread my investments into as many loans as possible. I want to do this in order to reduce my risks.

It would be time-consuming to do this manually, and this is where the auto-invest tool comes in handy.

The same 9 filters are available for the auto-invest profile setup. I don’t know if the auto-invest tool will pick up the best loans available on the market or not, the website is only saying it will select the first loans it finds on the primary market.

Summary on Viventor

These are the main things I like about Viventor:

• Loan interest rates are good
• Buyback guarantee also includes the interest payments
• a simple and complete user interface
• the number of loans is high enough to build a well-diversified portfolio

There are also things that I’d like to change on Viventor:

• it needs a 2-factor authentication in order to protect investors accounts
• Viventor needs to be more transparent about their loan originators; financial statements should be up to date for all of them; since Viventor is performing due diligence on the loan originators, a risk rating associated with them would help
• Viventor should also make public their financial statements, as a means of being more transparent with their investors