Secondary market transactions surge among European P2Ps
Secondary market transactions have surged among European peer-to-peer lending platforms, with Robocash reporting that its transaction volumes have almost doubled every month since last year.
The Croatia-based platform says that its secondary market transactions have increased 11 times in a year. This aligns with a wider trend which has seen 66 per cent of European P2P platforms reporting higher secondary market transactions in 2021 compared with 2020.
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Robocash research found that more than half of all European platforms offer the opportunity to sell or buy loans in the secondary market. The number of investors choosing a secondary market option can be as high as 74 per cent of all investors on the platform.
Since Robocash launched its own secondary market, 15 per cent of investors have used it to buy loans – far higher than the number of investors who use the secondary market to sell loans.
“This can be characterised by the fact that the majority of investors do not want to sell loans ahead of schedule, but they want to use the opportunity to increase their portfolio through loans from the secondary market,” said Robocash analysts.
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Compared to the size of the entire platform, the share of the secondary market on Robocash is small, the analysts added. As of September 2021, only 1.5 per cent of loans listed on the platform entered the secondary market. By comparison, in September 2020 the share of these loans was only close to 0.5 per cent.
“In the near future, the entire P2P market and the Robocash platform in particular will observe an increase in both the number of investors working with the secondary market and the market size itself, due its general popularisation,” said Robocash analysts.
“The growth will not be sharp and fast, since the secondary market can still be called an additional service for investors. However, this brings an opportunity to increase the liquidity of the portfolio in the first place.”
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