Fellow Finance

Fellow Finance Review

I started using Fellow Finance in March 2018. Interest rates are really attractive (up to 55%!), but without a Buyback guarantee, so I’ve been a little more cautious investing than with other platforms. As of today, I can conclude that the many defaults do not compensate the higher profitability offered, leaving me at the end, at least for the time being, with negative returns. As for strategy, as they do not have Buyback, I have invested only in loans with interest rates of over 48% and always the minimum amount, which in the case of Fellow Finance is quite high (25 EUR). I must say that there are other types of loans with less risk, which surely would have lead to a better performance than my (at the moment) unsuccessful investment strategy. It is a complex platform, and customer service is not particularly good, so I still have many doubts about how it operates. Surely studying it more thoroughly may give good returns. I will continue to explore it without increasing my position and I hope to be able to update the technical sheet more positively in the future.

• Platform Type: Crowdlending to individuals (P2P).
• Start: 2017, Finland.
• Modalities: Loans between individuals (from several hundred to several thousand Euro). In theory, there are also loans to SMEs, but none appears available. It could be because everyone immediately buy them with the AutoInvest.
• Geographic focus: Poland and Finland. Also Sweden and Germany, in theory, but I have not seen any.
• Currencies: EUR.
• Return rates: From 13% to 55%. It has an interesting system of auctioning loans, so at the end they tend to be issued several percentage points below the maximum profitability.
• Investment flow / Cash Drag: It seems like there are always loans available, but it is difficult to invest in them because of the complexity of both the AutoInvest and the auctions.
• Minimum investment (per loan): From 25 EUR.
• Payment modality: Interest get paid every month, along with the proportional percentage of the principal.
• Duration of loans: Between 12 and 60 months.
• Defaults: About 10% (that is, buying only the riskiest loans).
• Buyback: It does not exist.
• AutoInvest: Yes, there is a really detailed AutoInvest function that lets you select depending on virtually every conceivable criteria, although the interface is really confusing. It also has a manual option with many options, equally confusing.
• Secondary market: There is one, with many loans and options to select them according to various criteria. It’s really complex to grasp, so I have not used it yet.
• Interface / Tools: Really confusing interface. Enough information available and various graphs, but really hard to understand. You can view and download the list of investments and transactions, investing in automatic format …
• Taxes: They are not withhold.
• Customer Support: I have contacted them several times (by email), but they have answered only half of the times. And I still have many doubts about the platform!
• Languages: English and Finnish.
• Welcome promotion: None for the moment.