20 October 2019Money

FinBee review 2019

I’ve been investing in P2P loans for over 3 years now. FinBee P2P lending platform provides the greatest real returns on investment out of all the platforms I’ve seen.

General info

The company was incorporated on June 2015. Blog of the founder and CEO Laimonas Noreika - p2pskolinimas.lt (mix of Lithuanian and English) - is a good read if you want to get insights into his thinking. They have clear values that I sympathise with and it is the main thing that got me interested initially. Honesty and transparency is obvious when communicating with them.

Updated platform

As the time went, I was getting worried about their old and clunky platform and stopped putting money in for that reason. However, to my delight, on September 9, 2019 they have updated their platform, which makes for a much smoother and slicker experience.

The Good

I have invested over €50,000 in FinBee P2P lending platform.

FinBee P2P lending platform provides a stable supply of loans with a properly working auto-invest functionality. The platform requires little to no attention from my side and is very easy to set up and leave.

Return on investment

The calculated rate of return averages to 19.23% at the time of writing and the net rate (after tax) is over 12% (see the latest financial summary). FinBee automatically deducts 15% income tax for non-residents from earned interest every time the loan installment is received. If you live in UK, you can fill in DAS-1 form to get the tax reduced to 10% - see their FAQs for more info.

Returns over time. The dip early this year happened because I stopped automatic investments and withdrew some money.

Good auto-invest

FinBee platform provides flexible auto-invest tool, which allows me to easily bump the auto-invest amount if I put in a larger sum of money in and then go back to a smaller amount once all of the money has been invested to avoid the cash drag. Currently I keep my auto-invest amount at £50 if no money is coming in and I bump it to £100-250 if I get a larger sum of money coming in.

Low default rates

The best thing about it is the incredibly low default rate. Defaulted loans are categorised as loans that have been overdue for more than 90 days At the time of writing the default rate was 13.24%.

Default rate of 13.24%. "Count" is more accurate (higher) than "Amount" as I have recently deposited a large sum of money which skewed those numbers

Quick withdrawal processing

I had to withdraw 7 times in the past and the process has always been smooth and quick. It usually takes them about 2 business days to process the withdrawal, which is on par with the industry standards.

The Bad

FinBee platform has improved a lot since its early days. In the early years it used to annoy me when money returned from loans wouldn’t be automatically re-invested, but this issue has been addressed and things are now working as I would expect them to - all money received from loans is automatically re-invested if auto-invest feature is turned on. However, there still are a couple of things that I have seen implemented in a better way by other market players.

Selling of loans

This is the biggest downside that I see with FinBee currently. Compared to Funding Circle the loan selling process is very cumbersome. You have to click a checkbox next to each loan you want to sell, you can only have a max amount of 100 loans to tick on the box and when you click sell, the page takes a long time to load and sometimes even doesn’t load at all. When I was cashing out it took me about 1 hour to put up the loans I had for sale and then about 5 business days for the sales to finish so I could cashout ~€5,000. I wasn’t happy to say the least and it’s something that one has to be aware of when coming in to any platform where you plan to lend in small increments and may need to sell your loans early. In Funding Circle you select the amount you wish to sell. That’s it. Sure, it’s less flexibility and I’m not sure of the fees that were applied were, but it’s a much nicer process. I’d like to think that this could be improved in FinBee platform.

Loan selling is a bit cumbersome because there is no "Select all" option

You can set the price for all loans at once though, which is good

Security

This used to be part of “The Good” section, but after platform update fallen into “The Bad”. Hopefully temporarily. Before I think their approach to security was sensible, because they didn’t require to answer security questions when logging in (which I find really annoying with Funding Circle) and instead had a 2-factor authentication (2FA) when requesting to withdraw money, which is where security matters most to me.

Currently they don’t have neither security questions nor 2FA. Hopefull 2FA will be brought back soon.

FinBee platform verdict for 2019

Due to the high returns, platform improvements and incredibly low default rates I think this is the best platform in Europe. I will continue investing my money with them. You can start investing with them here.