facebookHas anyone used Funding Society (P2P) for more than a year? - Seedly

Anonymous

01 Feb 2020

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General Investing

Has anyone used Funding Society (P2P) for more than a year?

How's the p.a. like? 😁 Is it a worthwhile investment to make? What other possible investments should I be considering?

Discussion (2)

What are your thoughts?

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Dionysius Ang

01 Feb 2020

Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University

I have used Funding Society for about a year. The return has been around 10%.(Honestly, I am not sure if the return they show on the app is before or after their fees)

All in all, I find that it was quite a worthwhile tool to be used as the user interface is easy to understand and they have bots that can make the investment process a lot smoother.

However, due to the speculative nature of P2P, I would not recommend using it as your only way to invest (even if Funding society do offer the lowest in terms of loans - the lowest for each loan is $20). P2P is currently around 20% of my total portfolio. :)

I hope it helped you!

Hi! I've been using FundSoc for about a year now, my thoughts:

  1. I had 0 prior experience in any sort of investments, stocks, or P2P platform before going in. I found the platform very intuitive and easy to use. The customer service is quick and responsive, I accidentally 'invested' too much in a loan before and requested for the money to be taken out (the loan was not closed yet) and they did it for me very quickly. Everything can be done on the app which is what I do, and everything can be tracked easily.

  2. They have different types of loans for you to choose from, ie Secured (property backed), Term Financing, Revolving Facility but for me personally the most 'low risk' is invoice-backed loans (which means that business already has a proof of invoice and money coming in when project is completed but need the funds right now to run the project).

  3. Entry is low. While you have to top up $1k in the account initially, the minimum is $20 to back each project. Most projects have a maximum amount you can invest too so really good deals might only allow you to invest $20 max. For 'good deals' they are funded really quickly. ie, if the deal goes live at 2pm, I kinda have to be on standby at that time to fund it if the auto-invest bot didn't manage to get me a spot. Good deals can get snagged within 1-3mins. I know, its crazy.

But there are also what I call shady deals. Anything that's above 10% I find quite shady - usually very high risk so invest at your own risk.

  1. They have about 6-10 loans a day which I find is sufficient. They used to have only about 1-3 a day when they first started but they have increased it a lot recently.

  2. It is up to you to read each factsheet and see if they are a business you want to back. I find it quite comprehensive so even though they don't reveal company name I do find the information sufficient.

  3. As long as you diversify across many loans, you should be OK if the company defaults. I have not personally got a defaulted loan before but I do know of a friend that has a loan that defaulted. He did mention that FundSoc had a lot of updates in emails to notify investors of the current status in trying to retrieve the money. Ultimately, he did not manage to get his capital back unfortunately but he only invested $20 in that loan so it wasn't really a huge loss.

Definitely the advice is to spread your money across multiple loans. For me personally I have my money spreaded across 43 loans.

  1. They have an auto-invest bot which allows you to set the parameters and will help you automatically allocate for certain loans that meet your criteria. For the more secure loans like invoice backed ones I would allocate more money myself beyond what the bot allocates for me.

This is actually what I liked most about the platform. There are months that I can go without checking the app and the bot is actively re-investing my money for me.

  1. I like the loan terms.

I've tried another platform called seedin, how their loans usually work is that, say you loan $1k over 5 months for 5% interest - You get 1% interest for 5 months and your 1k back at the end of the 5 months.

How fundsoc loans usually work is, say you loan $1k over 5 months for 5% interest - You get $200+1% back every month for 5 months.

This allows you to reinvest the initial capital into other loans. Of course not every loan is this way but most of them are.

  1. FundSoc has recently added a calculator for each loan too so you can see you how much you will earn per loan for the amount you are backing.

Hope this helps!​​​

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