In recent years, consumer lending has expanded like wildfire through several online channels. Starting in 2006, this growth is mainly fueled by balance sheet lenders and Marketplace Lending (MPL) platforms, two business models that do not have banking licenses but still issue consumer loans to retail and business customers.
This market is rapidly growing – so big that even financial giants such as Goldman Sachs are dipping their toes in. Valued at more than $850 billion, this market is still not being fully explored by European alternative finance, which is lagging way behind the United States and the United Kingdom.
Currently, institutional investors do not have many options to diversify from established marketplace lenders. Either they put their own capital at risk by investing on a new marketplace that has little to no track record, or they set up costly legal, IT and analytics structure to fund off-balance sheet lender, which is not scalable.
Wanting to swim against these tides is Blackmoon, a technological platform that enables institutional investors to directly invest in newly-originated loans issued by balance sheet lenders in a marketplace fashion. This MPLaaS (Marketplace Lending as a Service) has offices in Russia and Cyprus, having recently launched their newest office in the United States.
With its proprietary technology and an expertise collected throughout the years, balance sheet lenders can use marketplace-lending techniques and enjoy the benefits of both models. Blackmoon allows them to scale operations without additional leverage, mitigate the default risk on their balance, and lock in profit and recover cash at the time of origination.
Oleg Seydak, CEO of Blackmoon, highlighted the aspects making this platform different:
“Blackmoon does not just provide balance-sheet lenders with the technology and business practices to sell their loans in a marketplace fashion either. It also aggregates and double checks all the information for investors, preventing the possible fraud from the lender in addition to desirable analytical and technical capabilities. Our loan assessment algorithms are fine-tuned to the specifics of each particular loan originator and ensure transparency for the investor and fair cost of funding for the originator.”
The company has reached big success, most likely due to the advanced technology employed in its product. Most importantly, Blackmoon uses machine-learning algorithms that independently calculate origination and servicing fees for each loan.
In addition, investors have been quite successful when using this platform: in the last year, they averaged returns were bigger than 15 percent, and the cumulative turnaround exceeded $13 million. Blackmoon wants to reach $1 billion in cumulative turnaround until the end of 2017, to which the company’s US expansion shall provide a decisive contribute.
Blackmoon’s MPLaaS platform is the best way for balance sheet lenders to expose their portfolio to institutional investors, as it provides the needed tools and forms a new asset class based on loans originated by lending companies. With this platform, investors and lenders alike can get access to a unified market, thus increasing transparency and obtaining unparalleled scalability capabilities.