The Bondora platform is available for borrowers to use in Estonia, Spain, Finland and Slovakia, whilst lenders can access the service in 29 European countries. The rebrand arrives in tandem with a €1.3m fundraising round – which sees Bondora welcome a host of new faces to the board. Mark Noetzold, Joāo P. S. Monteiro and Mati Otsmaa will unite to improve, market and promote Europe’s first cross-border p2p lending platform.
Monteiro, SAP SD and GTS Consultant at BMW, said:
“Direct or p2p lending is the most rapidly developing financial service today and has a huge future potential by offering the best solutions to the borrowers and high returns for the lenders. I believe that Bondora, with its cross-border strategy, strong team and the ability to execute fast, has the potential to change the world of finance to be more transparent and straightforward.”
Monteiro and his fellow Angel investors reportedly now hold between 19% and 20% of Bondora’s shares. Bondora CEO Pärtel Tomberg also commented on the news:
“Over the last 5 years we have brought together over 70,000 customers from 29 countries to borrow and lend on our platform. The newly raised capital will be used to improve, market and raise awareness of our service further. Today we have a product, where a telephone engineer from Estonia could get funds to renovate his flat from a dozen of lenders located in any European country. Not only do our borrowers get a chance to have their loans financed, but they get the best available deal on the marketplace. A secretary from Slovakia, for example, ready to pay 28% for a 600 Euro loan to study English, might end up paying only 12% because lenders pile in. It is a simple and secure application process for the borrowers and a possibility to diversify private investment for the lenders. At the moment 26% of our lenders come from Germany, 11% from the UK and 4% from Switzerland (with the rest being spread across Europe). With the rapid growth of the company in the last year, the old name could no longer accommodate room for our cross-border growth, that is why today we are also launching our new name – Bondora, and our website available in 23 languages.”
Bondora has issued over €14m in loans thus far. We’ll be curious to see how far this international platform’s web can spread.
