“LoanBook is working on an investment round of 25 million euros, which will be divided between capital (three million) and debt, to accompany the demand of institutional clients and strengthen its structure in order to tackle future growth challenges from 2019”. COO of LoanBook the situation of his company to Kippel01 just 5 months ago. Nevertheless, things have changed a lot since then for the Spanish firm of and today it has informed its clients of the suspension of its operations.
LoanBook, in trouble: a point… and apart?
“We regret to inform you that we have suspended the financing of new operations through our Marketplace until further notice.
The company is experiencing difficulties in raising the necessary capital for LoanBook to continue to grow as an independent platform. In this regard, the Board of Directors has decided suspend financing of new loans while weighing the company’s options.
In any case, indicate that the company, as it cannot be otherwise, has the necessary support and measures to maintain the servicing of the portfolio at maturity, as well as normal collection activity, so this decision does not affect the ongoing servicing of existing loan positions, both outstanding and unpaid. In this sense, loan repayments will continue to be processed and credited to investors’ accounts through normal operations.
This is the statement he has published in which he makes it clear that the failure of its has been the trigger for the decision to paralyze its operations. The company, which is contacting customers who have used it to make their investments by telephone, is striving to offer an image of trust that avoids, as far as possible, the uncertainty associated with such a situation:
«Investors will also be able to continue accessing their online account normally, including the option to withdraw available cash from your accounts. However, our system will not accept new bids or money transfers from investors until further notice. Those bids made after 12 noon on March 5 have been cancelled.
Since it was created in October 2013, LoanBoook has reached 50 million euros of credit granted to SMEs. In these five years of operation, it has formalized 830 operations and has financed some 400 SMEs.
What is crowdlending
Crowdlending is a new type of financing aimed at solving the capital needs of many small and medium-sized companies in the current context of a credit crunch. Through crowdlending, a series of small investors decide to become something like small bankers, and contribute resources to a specific company, which agrees to return that contribution (plus a few interests known in advance) within a specified period of time. The entire operation is carried out through one of the platforms of existing crowdlending, without there being a financial institution involved
Crowdlending Vs Crowdfunding
Unlike crowdfunding (one of whose main actors is the well-known ), in crowdlending it is not about giving a non-refundable amount to any project, but rather that whoever contributes the resources expect to make a profit in the future, fixed from the beginning of the contract. In addition, while crowdfunding projects can be of any type (from solidarity initiatives to some other more eccentric ones, as in the case of), crowdlending is specifically designed to support companies, and only companies, being very useful in the case of the startup
Crowdlending in Spain
Despite the fact that crowdlending is a more or less developed model in countries around us (with the cases of Proposer and Lending Club as main exponents), in Spain it took time for different alternatives to appear to cover this service, such as Arboribus, Growly or MyTripleA. The future success of their proposals will largely depend on the confidence that the model generates both in companies and investors, for which some of these platforms (such as Arboribus) try to allocate solvency ratings to the projects presented, to help investors make their decision
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