Bondora's Master Plan

Bondora, Estonian P2P marketplace for loans, plans to expand it’s offering to become increasingly like Procter&Gamble, which manages many different brands across consumer space.

“We want to be the same for financial products,” founder and CEO Pärtel Tomberg told ArcticStartup in an interview

This could include almost any financial product, but these would likely be offered under different brand

“We can talk about mortgage in 2016, or maybe 2017,” Tomberg said.

Pärtel

 

“Eventually, it is Nordea and the gang we wanna go after.”

Bondora was founded as isePankur back in 2008 and pioneered the concept of social lending in Estonia. Today it has lending clients also in Finland and Spain – and investors in 40 countries around the world.

The service allows individuals and small to medium-sized enterprises to borrow and lend between each other, skipping the whole traditional banking process.

This year Bondora has got approval from Estonian FSA, the local financial regulator, and it reached a 1 billion euros milestone for loan applications filed through its platform.

 

Bondora is the market leader in consumer loans in Estonia and aims to become in Finland No 1 among non-banks this year and go after banks in 2017.

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Since the latest financial crisis, the landscape in banking sector has changed fast and this has helped to boost fintech startups across Europe. Old and outdated banks, with overly regulated processes tagging along cannot catch up with the trend, and that is how fintech boom was born. As Forbes explains “easing payment processes, reducing fraud, saving users money, promoting financial planning, and ultimately moving a giant industry forward”. Since then, the structure, the distribution package between borrowers and lenders has changed, and also the cost of doing it, thanks to technology.

 

The innovation of fintech startups has been mostly about delivery part. “No fintech company has actually created a single product. We did not create loans nor lending,” Tomberg said.

  

With additional reporting by Bac Le.