136 B2B FinPal — my second P2P lending company

B2B FinPal — my second P2P lending company


After I joined my first P2P lending company  —  Funding Societies, I surveyed other P2P lending companies. I get to know Funding Societies has the biggest market share, followed by Fundaztic and B2B FinPal.

Actually, Fundaztic is the second company I joined but I did not put money into it. This is because Fundaztic needs RM2,000 to have auto-investment facilities. And I do not want to put that much. Another thing is Fundaztic's lending are longer term — up to 2 or 3 years. I also do not want to lock my money that long.

(Auto-investment is a function where we as investors put our criteria into their system. When an opportunity that meet our criteria appears, lending company will help us to bid for the opportunity. Without auto-investment, investors can always select manually.)

Then after that I surveyed B2B FinPal. They need RM1,000 for auto-investment and their lending are very short term (mostly I see 2–3 months). This short lending period gets me interested. I set the minimum investment amount for each lending to be RM100. If each lending can give me 0.5%–1% net interest per month, it's very good for me — consider that I get almost nothing in savings account.



Registration

Funding Societies and Fundaztic are easier to open account. Simply fill up the online form. For Funding Societies, wait few days for them to activate the account. For Fundaztic, they will bank in a random amount of money into our savings account as verification code. For B2B Finpal, we need to print out and complete their agreement.

(I think Funding Societies has improved their registration process. My mentor told me he had to print out the agreement as well.)



Lending

After joining those P2P lending companies, I realized that so many SME need funding. Some need big amount, some small, some longer term, some very short term. I think each P2P lending companies has positioned themselves in the area they want to be.

Funding Societies has both short term (3 months invoice financing opportunity) and long term (1-2 years business term financing). Fundaztic is mostly longer term (above 2 years) financing. B2B FinPal short term financing only. Of course, shorter term financing comes with lower interest rate.

I received emails everyday from, almost all three companies, about lending opportunities for me to consider. This is such a big market. P2P lending companies must be a great help to them. At least better than going to Ah-Long funding. ^_^

I think by this rate of lending opportunities, minimum investment amount of RM1,000 will be used up very soon. About a week or two in Funding Societies, about RM400 has been allocated for lending.



Fees

All three companies do not charge account opening fee. However, please note the platform fee (or the fee charged from repayment or sharing on interest received). Funding Societies has a low platform fee. B2B FinPal platform fee (sharing rate) is actually quite high. That said, B2B Finpal offered undeniably me an opportunity to get interest rate higher than conventional savings account.



Never forget — Risk

Although P2P lending is regulated in Malaysia, and each licensed companies has their set of lending criteria, I see it as a high risk investment because the creditor can possibly default. The default rate is perhaps very low, but we should not perceived it to be low risk. "Low default does not mean no default". That's why I do not want to lock my money for long term.

In investment, never forget "high risk, high return". In equity investment, we always aim for 8%–10% type of compound return. In P2P lending here, I see the interest rate can 10% or 15% per annum, so it must be of higher risk. So, I want to control each participation to the minimum requirement (RM100), and shorter term lending.



Referral Scheme

All the three companies provide referral scheme. And mine are

Funding Societies:- http://promo.fundingsocieties.com.my/referral-program/?r=jjqsmwav

Fundaztic:- https://p2p.fundaztic.com:443/generalize/regist?member=e1hvJ8%2Fctu1o9eb9s9%2FZXA%3D%3D,

B2B Finpal :- Put IN001029-Teo Soon Ann in the last column Referral Code when doing registration at https://prod.b2bfinpal.com/investor/registration.



Last word

Never forget to go for regulated investment scheme only. And the company must be licensed. I am glad many investment schemes in Malaysia are regulated. So many scams has happened in Malaysia, and so many innocent investors lost a lot of money.

With that, my exposure in P2P lending is consider complete. What follows is the monitoring process of each companies operation, opportunities, and most importantly the default rate.