We finished the last year on a major improvement to Bondora; we introduced Bondora Rating and risk-based pricing to make investing across multiple markets easier, more transparent and more consistent. This change was imminent to accommodate the new investors, who did not have or were not willing to develop the sophistication of early adopters, but rather sought the premium returns Bondora provides.
This year marked a point in time when marketplace lending went truly mainstream with the investors on both sides of the spectrum, from retail investors to global hedge funds, joining the game. In order to accommodate the changing landscape of investors and continue on our mission of “lending beyond borders” we aim to evolve Bondora to the new level by the end of this year.
The core product will remain intact; namely, we will continue growing the supply of investment opportunities across the markets we operate, as well as remain as transparent as possible about the data we collect about the borrowers. However, the way Investors will be able to invest into loan listings will change:
Passive Investing: Bondora.com (or the web layer) will transition to being a product geared solely towards passive investors. In practice it means the following:
- We will replace Portfolio Manager and Portfolio Builder with a new product that will be free of unnecessary complexities, such as allocations, bid amounts, etc., and will fully automate achieving the preferred rate of return at the desired risk level;
- Portfolio Builder will be a sole option for investing (or selling your investments) through the web layer; thus, we will sunset both Primary and Secondary Markets;
- We will consolidate reporting (such as Investment List, Transactions, Account Statement, Data Export, etc.) into a single section making it the sole “go to place” for regular or adhoc reporting purposes.
In a nutshell: Think of highly sophisticated investment engine that works towards your target return and is controllable through a single-page dashboard.
Active Investing: an API (Application Program Interface) will be introduced to support investors looking to use custom investing strategies. In practice it mean the following:
- We will provide all investors a programmatic way (through an API) to access and invest into all loans that have passed our credit checks and scoring;
- Similarly to the current loan listing details, the API will provide all information about the prospect borrower that we are legally allowed to provide; thus, investors will be able to apply custom evaluation models before making an investment decision;
- We are investing into infrastructure to ensure robustness and stability of the API in the events of high volume requests what was difficult to maintain through a web interface.
In a nutshell: Think of a highly granular and extremely fast access to all investment opportunities (a fire hose) without the limitations that a web layer imposes.
Instead of building and maintaining web layer features for a narrow user base, the above will allow us to focus the efforts of our 50+ people team on things that will benefit every investor on the platform; namely, growing of supply of quality investment opportunities and further improving the credit scoring.
We have already initiated the talks with developers that will build the tools for investors based on our API. We are happy to support the developer community with our know how, user surveys, as well as feature requests that we have collected over the years, but never got to implement ourselves. If you are interested in learning more about the API please email us at api@bondora.com.
