Category: Platform Updates

Good news: there are even more ways to build earnings on the Bondora platform. If you’ve used Bondora and appreciate our value, you can share the benefits with others while making money in the process.

Bondora has recently initiated an affiliate program. Participants can earn money for every new investor they bring to the site. Our affiliate program page offers details on the program but below are the main points.

Two ways to earn more

First, you’ll earn 5€ for every person who originates from your affiliate link and registers on Bondora. Each week Bondora emails a summary of affiliate statistics. You’ll receive your earnings within 20 days from the successful registration of the user.

Second, you’ll receive 5% of the amount the new user invests during the first 30 days after registering. The average Bondora customer invests 4,000€, therefore the value for successful affiliates can be significant. This is a one-time payment per new user. Bondora calculates the portion of your investment reward after 30 days from the registration date of the respective referred investor. You’ll receive payment for your share of the invested sum within 20 business days after the calculation day.

Earnings can be paid to a bank account of your choosing or directly into your Bondora account.

Getting started

There are only three steps to start participating in our affiliate program:

• contact us at affiliate@bondora.com
• you’ll receive a unique Bondora affiliate URL with promotion materials
• promote Bondora to start earning

 

Learn more about our affiliate program

For the past months we have been working on splitting the business and product into two separate parts. One business is designed to serve the investor exclusively. The other serves only the borrower.

Why are we splitting the system?

The decision to divide the system was triggered by legal changes but is now rooted in one goal: to improve the performance, stability and development speed of the investor product. We want to have a very well tested and high performing investor core product where user experience can be continuously and quickly improved without quality issues. A separated system design will achieve that purpose.

While our current design offers usability and an intuitive design we’ve learned that improvements to the loan product create downstream problems for the investor product. Dividing the system will prevent this issue. As a result, we can focus on upgrades and improvements without the restrictions associated with different system needs.

How will this change benefit the end user?

One of the benefits of this system update is that it will enable us to initiate fractional calculations when determining payments and claims. The increased precision of this method allows for a more equitable distribution of cash among investors. Fractional computation also enhances the liquidity of existing investments and portfolios. Therefore investors can sell whole loan portfolios at once while buyers take a fraction of each loan rather than full single loans. In effect, secondary trades can be priced on a portfolio level, which more accurately reflects the value of high-performing and poor-performing loans. Finally, the change will create more robust reporting and analytical features with concise visualizations for granular-level data.

What’s the current state of the transition?

Initially, we’ve achieved a legal separation of the investor product from the borrower. Next, we’ll complete the disengaging of the two entities from a technological standpoint. In the meantime, we’ll continue to make our regular improvement to the user experience and updates to our core products.

On November 1, 2016 we will remove the Primary Market view from the user interface.

What does this mean?

In recent months it has become clear that the Portfolio Manager offers greater efficiency through automation compared to manually investing. The increasing benefits of Portfolio Manager are the result of recent updates to the funding process, which optimize speed. Moving forward we will continue to focus efforts on further improving Portfolio Manager, Bondora API, Secondary Market and the reporting features available on the platform.

Why is Bondora removing the Primary Market from the user interface?

Bondora is removing the Primary Market from the UI because the speed of our popular automated option meets the investing and borrowing needs before manual investing can take effect. Our process improvements have created an environment where almost all loans are funded before they become visible in the UI. As a result, the Primary Market is most of the time empty.

This scarcity is due to the fact that when a loan enters the market it is open to bids for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes expire the loan is closed. Our internal analysis and reporting shows that almost 100% of loans are funded within this brief window of time. Therefore, there is little reason to hold loans open any longer, as doing so would create unnecessary delays.

What should API users do?

Removing the primary market from the user interface does not change anything for Bondora API users. However, API users should review their settings for polling loans from primary market and reconfigure their settings to match the changes to the current funding process. We recommend that the polling of new loans be set to once a minute. Our API allows for speeds up to one query per second, however such rapid polling is also not recommended.

Last week we talked about how to get more out of our Portfolio Manager by using the various settings to customize it according to your needs. The customizable settings allow investors to execute their chosen portfolio strategy better, ensure that their money is invested and not sitting idle on their account (i.e cash drag). This has been one of the concerns raised by our investors and we aim to improve this.

In the upcoming releases we will make changes to the Portfolio Manager and its settings with the purpose of further improving the Portfolio Manager performance and meet the expectations from our investors to reduce cash drag.

Summary of Portfolio Manager improvements

The changes to the Portfolio Manager are highlighted here below:

• Diversification setting “Min loans in Portfolio“ in the “Automatic Bid Size” option will be removed from the Portfolio Manager default settings (see the image below) because
  • a) it is conflict with the deployment period setting (for example if investor sets a long deployment period and low diversification then those conditions are not compatible)
  • b) less than 5% default Portfolio Managers use these settings.
    The default diversification value will still be set to 200 loans in portfolio but the user will not be able to change it from settings anymore. For users who already have set a custom diversification level, the setting will be kept until the next Portfolio Manager setting update. Then it will be automatically set to default value (200 loans in portfolio). Investors who would like to set bid sizes themselves and not use “Automatic Bid Size” option, we encourage using advanced settings of the Portfolio Manager.
• We will now start running the Portfolio Managers as soon as the loans reach the market instead of running them periodically once in an hour. This way the funds will be allocated faster.
• Every loan will be evaluated in terms of which portfolios are the most suitable for it.
• Investors bids will be made into loans which have a lower or equal risk profile than the risk profile of that investors whole portfolio.
• Investors bids will be made into loans that have higher risk profile only in the case when, after making the investment, the risk level of investors’ whole portfolio does not increase (i.e making the investment does not change portfolios risk profile).

You can now earn some extra income by introducing your friends to Bondora. We are proud to announce our Refer-A-Friend offer.

People don’t tell their friends about something unless they really like it whether it’s a new gadget, a new restaurant or a new beer they just tried. Social proof through friends is some of the best evidence we can use to be sure we are doing a good job serving you.

The more they invest, the more you make

The principle of the program is simple – the more they invest, the more you make. Our average customer invests more than 4,000 EUR on Bondora. So for example, if your friends portfolio is EUR 4,000, you’ll earn EUR 200; for portfolio size EUR 8,000, you’ll get EUR 400.

Anyone who joins with your custom referral link and becomes an investor on our site, gets 5 EUR added to their account for their first investment. When you refer them, you get 5% of everything they have invested over the first 30 days. You get paid inside 20 business days after their first 30 days on the site. As long as your friend invests at least 10 EUR and follows our terms and conditions that all investors have to follow, the money is yours.

How It Works

Our Refer-A-Friend offer is available to all Bondora investors. As a Bondora investor, you get a custom referral URL from your Dashboard to share with your friends, family and colleagues. It’s as easy as passing that link around and asking them to check us out.

Summary of the basic campaign flow

1. After logging into Bondora account, you can find more information about the Refer-A-Friend offer from the „Refer-A-Friend“ section on the Dashboard.
2. In the „Refer-A-Friend“ section, you will see a custom generated referral URL, which you can share to all friends and family. You can also share the offer on your social media accounts by using the links in the „Refer-A-Friend“ section.
3. To every referred friend that signs up, we will give 5€ to make their first free investment on Bondora.
4. After your friend signs up (through the referral link) and begins investing, your work is done. We’ll credit your account based on the size of you friends investment portfolio after 30 days.

 

Login to your Bondora account

Share your good experiences investing on Bondora with your friends and family using your custom link and our Refer-A-Friend offer. They earn and you earn. It’s a win/win situation. Get your link and share it today.

If you have questions about this offer, you can email us at investor@bondora.com.

We like being transparent here at Bondora, and we like giving you our loan data for your own analysis. You can slice and dice all the data however you want to come up with your own method of selecting loans for investment.

When you look at the Public Reports in the “Shared Legend between Public and Private” there are many different data points that you can look at across loans. For example, a couple of them are BidsPortfolioManager and BidsManual, which ables to compare how many investment offers are made on a loan through Portfolio Manager or done through manual selection.

Maybe you have developed a method of loan selection where you think that selection by one of these methods is more important so you give that more emphasis in your search criteria.

We want you to have as much good quality data as possible to make your loan investment decisions, so we are releasing 14 new data points for the „Investments list“ report which you can see in this table below.

These include items like PenaltyLateAmount showing the amount of late charges the borrower has to pay and NextPaymentNr which shows the count of scheduled payments made. Another important data point is ReScheduledOn, which shows when a new payment schedule was assigned to a borrower.

All these new data points are not only available in the Public Reports and Investments list report, but they are also mostly available in the Investments section of your Dashboard (see image below). Here in the upper right corner you can click to set the new data points in your own Settings and set them however you wish.

 

 

It is particularly helpful to include the Last Payment and Next Payment fields in your Settings especially if you are looking to buy more loans or sell some on the Secondary Market. This is a great way to get a quick glance of what your repayment history on your loans looks like. Today if you saw that all your loans have paid for September already then you would know in about 10 seconds that your portfolio is Current. If some show the last payment as July or June, then you know you have some late payments or slow pays to watch.

Having good data to make your investment decisions is our number 1 priority and this should help you with your loan selection criteria moving forward.

The first thing you probably noticed is faster loading times. We did some cool techie stuff to enable faster loading of these pages whether on your desktop or mobile. You don’t have to wait as long to see how your portfolio is doing or do things like activate the Portfolio Manager or update and rebalance your portfolio. We are all for time saving here.

What you see on the Dashboard is now simplified to show just Account Value, Net Profit, Net Return and Portfolio Value. Our Portfolio Value is calculated as Outstanding Principal less overdue principal. All these things and Available Funds are all that show on the new Dashboard header.

Here’s what that looks like:So where is the rest of the info that was on the old Dashboard?

All the other info that was there before like Reserved Funds, Pending Offers, Deposits and WIthdrawals are all available under that More Stats button up on the upper right of the new Dashboard. Just click there and you will find what you need.

The portfolio manager is listed both in the header and below to make it easier to start, stop, pause or resume investments with it. You told us it was too tough to find and change while in the Dashboard so now it’s right in front, more streamlined and simplified.

Track Your Account Activity More Easily

Just below the header on the right, you can see all your Account Activity over the last 24 hours. You can see payments made and click over to see payments not made too. This is going to be a time saver too as you can see what your Account Activity looks like right away. It’s pretty cool.

What Else is New?

Sometimes you only have a few minutes here and there to login and see how your account is doing. We wanted you to find what you want as easily as possible so the most recent weekly video and the 3 most recent blog posts from the Bondora blog are all showing there in the Dashboard for you to view and read at your leisure. You can get the most out of our site while you are on it and then get back to work or fun quickly by this streamlined setup on the Dashboard.

Bondora’s goal with this new Dashboard is to have it now be Command Central for all things you want to access on the site. Want to watch a video? It’s there. Want updated blog posts? It’s there. Want to compare portfolio strategies? That’s there too.

The key component of all of these things you may want on the site are now all available in the new Dashboard. Tell us below in the comments. Do you like the changes?

Tracking your investments and staying fully invested is easier than ever with the Portfolio Manager on Bondora.

The last major update to Portfolio Manager focused on 9 big feature improvements that provide many benefits. Two of these benefits are creating your own custom settings for your portfolio to cover the criteria most important to you and 9 total investment strategies to choose from for portfolio building based on your own comfort with risks and returns from only 3 choices prior.

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Split Investment Feature

One of the 9 big feature improvements was the Option to Split Your Investment into smaller bids to make it more liquid. This setting in the Portfolio Manager allows for greater loan diversification by lowering the bid size. You have more money to spread around more loans building a truer p2p loan portfolio. Some loans may be worthy of a 100 Euro investment and other times that same 100 Euro should be split into 4-6 loans. There’s more flexibility by being able to sell off a 25 EUR piece of a 100 EUR loan instead of a 100 EUR loan and more buyers at the 25 EUR level. Selling a 100 EUR investment in 25 EUR parts means more buyers and faster sales than waiting for a single 100 EUR buyer.

Bondora has Europe’s largest secondary market for p2p loans and you can enable buying on the secondary market within the Portfolio Manager. You get nearly instant full investment of your Euro and just as nearly instant liquidity for the pieces of loans you want to sell. All at the push of a button.

Lenders who enable secondary market buying really love maximizing their investment and keeping as much cash invested as possible.  Online investing can lead to cash drag if you aren’t diligent about staying fully invested.

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New Feature Announcement

There are some lenders who have not taken advantage of the enabled buying or the other customized settings yet. To help those who may want to access this liquidity, Bondora has changed the default setting by setting it at 25 EUR. Now lenders large and small can buy and sell pieces of their loans in their portfolio.

If you have set your bid size already then this improvement doesn’t affect you. Your settings are still intact.  If you have not set a bid size then the new 25 EUR default will apply to you.

The 25 EUR default bid size creates more chances for large and small investors to buy and sell pieces of their Bondora investments to each other.  This equals faster purchases and sales and better liquidity for all.

The new default setting benefits all investors as liquidity is like insurance or the police. You don’t know that you need the police or your insurance company or portfolio liquidity until you need it. Bondora is planning ahead for those who may need liquidity later but are not asking for it now by giving the greatest chance to buy or sell pieces of your portfolio with this limit set at 25 EUR.

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What if I don’t want the 25 EUR bid size?

If the 25 EUR max bid is not for you, then it’s a very easy change. All you do to override the default setting is go into the Portfolio Manager, uncheck the ‘Calculate Automatically’ field and changing the Bid Size settings to the setting you prefer.

This is where you find it:

We are continually working to make the Portfolio Manager as effective as possible for all lenders on our platform. Getting more cash invested faster to reduce cash drag and more liquidity for purchases and sales on the secondary market is good for everyone.  That’s what this new default bid size will bring.

What improvements would you like to see on the platform? How do you like this new default feature?

We are currently updating all data features across our different channels: API, Data Export and web. The updates will consolidate all our different data sources and thereby make the exact same data and information available to each investor regardless of the channel they use.

Today there are differences in available data points as well as the definitions behind different data points with similar labels. These differences are due to having our technology built over 7 years. Therefore we need to consolidate the data sources through a new technology that will allow us to resolve all data conflicts and discrepancies. Shortly it will be very easy to navigate in the vast sets of information Bondora makes available.

Unfortunately due to technical constraints we are not able to release all changes at once and we need to make adjustments gradually. Some of the updates have already been implemented whilst the rest is expected to complete during August.

You can keep track of the changes through our data map available on the Public Reports page. This map shows which data points are available through which channels, the label in Data Export as well as the description. We have also included the previous label if there has been a change (highlighted in italic). Descriptions of removed data points are all set to [OBSOLETE].

Cells marked in green indicate that this data point is already available in the particular channel whilst yellow means that it’s going to be released shortly. Most white calls will soon also be colored green. This is unless the particular data point is not available at the time of the data source in question is polled (e.g. it is not possible to show loans active late category when it is still on the Primary Market).

Please note that there might still be label changes in Data Export to harmonize it with labels used in the API. Thereafter the labels in the API and Data Export will match. All used labels, including the label in our web user interface, will be made available through the legend to make cross-referencing easier.

We are very thrilled to announce our biggest Portfolio Manager and Dashboard release to date. Since last October we have fine-tuned our two most actively used products a couple of times. In the first weeks of August we are making a great leap forward and adding a lot of features heavily requested by our investor community.

NEW FEATURES

1. Investment size calculation tailored to meet your targets
2. Advanced settings that let you over-ride each individual variable in our investment size formula
3. Option to split your investment into multiple smaller bids to make it more liquid
4. Better control through more granular risk-return strategy options
5. Expected portfolio distribution charts include existing loans to improve estimates
6. More inventory as Portfolio Manager will be also buying from the Secondary Market
7. Faster liquidity with one-click sell button
8. Easy to use simulation that lets you calculate net returns the way you think is right
9. Transferwise withdrawals made easy through the Dashboard

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Investment size calculation tailored to meet your targets

The suggested investment size calculation now takes into more data specific to your portfolio and strategy to arrive at the suggested investment size. The algorithm includes six variables: (1) point of diversification (X – by default 200); (2) the desired capital deployment period (Y – by default 2 weeks); (3) the number of loans expected to be available for investment over this period (Z); (4) your total deposits (T); (5) your available cash balance (C); and (6) your expected cash inflow over the defined deployment period (CF).

The suggested investment size is calculated by dividing your cash balance and expected cash inflow over the defined deployment period with the number of loans expected to be available during this period. In simple terms the suggested investment size equals (C + CF) / Z. The minimum investment is 5 EUR as before. The maximum investment is calculated by dividing your total deposits with point of diversification (T / X). Point of diversification is the number of loans that you should include in your portfolio to have a reasonably diversified portfolio.

Advanced settings that let you over-ride each individual variable in our investment size formula

Investors who feel that the default settings do not suit them can override most of the individual variables in the formula above. You can override point of diversification, and capital deployment period. You can of course set your own minimum and maximum amounts instead of using our formula. Additionally you are able to define the free cash balance you would like to keep on your account for withdrawals.

Option to split your investment into multiple smaller bids to make it more liquid

Investors on Bondora are not all investing with the same amounts of capital. Therefore some investors are making considerably larger investments into single loans compared to others. We are now adding an option to split your investments into smaller bids in order for larger investors to be better able to liquidate parts of their portfolios. In case your investment per loan is 100 EUR and you have defined the bid size to be 15 EUR then the system will make 7 bids into a loan, 6 bids of 15 EUR and 1 bid of 10 EUR.

Better control through more granular risk-return strategy options

Investors looking to increase or decrease the available investment pool will be able to do so by choosing among 9 strategies. We are adding Ultra Conservative as well as Opportunistic strategies as well as options in between the 2 new and 3 existing strategies.

Please remember that these strategies remain within the context of Bondora and therefore an Ultra Conservative strategy cannot be compared with an ultra-conservative stock or bond strategy (e.g. blue chips or German bunds). Bondora should be viewed as higher yield part of your portfolio and total portfolio allocation towards Bondora should be set based on this assumption.

Expected portfolio distribution charts include existing loans to improve estimates

The expected portfolio distribution charts calculation includes both your existing and new loans. The loans that are expected to be added to your portfolio over the desired allocation period are added to the existing portfolio to arrive at the estimates. The estimates for new loans are calculated based on your chosen risk-return strategy and recent market statistics.

More inventory as Portfolio Manager will be also buying from the Secondary Market

We have been steady increases in secondary trading since we introduced our API. However the trading still considerably lags behind Primary Market volumes and available inventory as most investors are not using the Secondary Market. We are addressing the liquidity constrain by adding Secondary Market inventory to the pool available for the Portfolio Manager. This step will both increase the liquidity for existing investors as well as allows new investors to buy into seasoned and lower risk assets.

The Portfolio Manager will initially buy only loans that are not overdue (principal nor interest) at a price equal to the principal balance or below. No trades will be made above par or on overdue loans until it’s possible to completely harmonize the Primary and Secondary Market pricing.

In case you are interested only in new originations then you can turn off this option through the Portfolio Manager Advanced Settings

Faster liquidity with one-click sell button

Selling your investments will be made extremely easy. You will be able to define the amount of capital you need and the system will do the rest. This feature is neatly packaged on the Dashboard. Loans will be put on sale with current loans first and overdue ones thereafter with newest loans sold first before seasoned ones. The sale price will be calculated as the principal balance less principal payments overdue by schedule. In other words if you put your entire portfolio to sale then it will be priced the same way as the account value is calculated.

Easy to use simulation that lets you calculate net returns the way you think is right

Many active investors have their own views on the future. A couple of months ago we released the new cash flow page that allowed overriding our net return calculation with estimates of your own. We are now adding the configuration option to the dashboard as most investors do not use our more advanced features.

The simulation tool will allow you to set your own estimates for the likelihood of principal and interest to be received from performing plus delinquent loans and loans in default. You can either use estimates calculated based on your and overall Bondora portfolio or derive these numbers through the historic cash flow, personal statistics or data export.

Transferwise withdrawals made easy through the Dashboard

Our customers outside of Eurozone or who do not have a euro account can now easily withdraw money through Transferwise. Simply enter the withdrawal amount and use the Transferwise option. Everything else will happen automatically.