Spain has huge growth potential to match France, Germany and UK markets
According to AltFi.com, the source of news and analysis for the alternative finance industry, the crowdlending market in Europe more than doubled in the last 12 months. Crowdlending in Europe surpassed €3,022m of new loans in 2015. New loans in Europe grew by 106% in comparison to 2014.
€2,569m (83%) of total new loans were originated in the UK due to the earlier start and greater maturity of the UK market. The next largest market was Germany with 5.1% of the total European volume, followed by France with 3.6%. Spain had a share of 0.4% with just over €13.7m of new loans in 2015. Clearly the Spanish market has growth potential.
In the period from April 2006 to September 2015, returns on crowdlending have ranged between 4% to 7% per annum for Europe in aggregate. These returns are dominated by the UK returns since this accounted for such a large percentage of the market.
As an indicator of what might happen in the Spanish market, in the more mature UK market crowdlending platforms have offered a very stable average return of 4.5% to 6% since 2006.
Spanish platforms offer a slightly higher return in comparison to the 5.5% achieved in the UK market.
In the light of current stock market volatility, private and institutional investors are diversifying their portfolios by lending through online platforms. The Spanish market has already reached a sufficient volume to offer stability and reliability to investors and still has a period of rapid growth ahead of it to reach the same level of importance of crowdlending in the French, German and UK markets.
