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As the new year begins and we are preparing to face new challenges, we wоuld like to look back at the past year and remind you of what happened to us during the 12 inspiring months of 2018. One thing is certain – we continued to establish P2P investment as a safe and proven tool for alternative funding and to work on improving the convenience of our platform. The results did not take long to follow – we already have 38 million euro in invested funds and more than 9,300 registered investors. The number of listed credits increased by 196% – a total of 284,000 amounting to 107 million euro. The average annual yield rose from 8.9% to 9.2%. However, we would like to remind you that if you have a well-diversified portfolio and choose the loans wisely, you can achieve a return on investment of up to 15%.
In 2018, two new originators joined the iuvo portfolio – BBG from Georgia and Fast Finance from Romania. They presented a new package of opportunities for our users – auto loans and business loans, and strengthened our position in Southeast Europe. Viva Credit, in turn, joined with mortgage loans. The buy-back guarantee, valid for all loans, continues to be a key indicator of investment security with iuvo.
In the past year, in addition to new investment opportunities, we added a real iuvo credit option. This was a direct consequence of the credit intermediary license granted to us in 2017 by the Estonian Financial Supervision Authority. We are proud to have received the Estonian regulatory authority’s vote of confidence and we are grateful for the opportunity to develop our business model in new directions.
Meanwhile, we continued to improve the platform’s capabilities. We added a new online payment method – Trustly, with the help of which payments are reflected in real time, making it easier to deposit. We updated the “Deposit” and “Withdrawal” screens, the “Account Statement” section, and we added a shopping cart to make buying and selling credits easier. We also improved the “Primary Market”, “Secondary Market” and “My Investments” screens of the mobile versions.
In July we celebrated our second birthday. During the first two years, our team doubled in size and will continue to grow this year. Thanks to the people in the iuvo team, we are able to maintain a personal relationship with our investors, which is extremely important for them as well as for us. We do this not only by maintaining direct online and press presence, or with the help of partners such as Bloomberg TV Bulgaria, but also through participation in various forums such as the Investor Finance Forum, the Annual Fintech Forum hosted by the Capital newspaper, “The Future of Money” hosted by Manager magazine and by attending the DevReach and LendIT London conferences.
As a company concerned with the problems of society, in 2018 we joined the world-wide mission of a green planet, through our campaign “What’s the value of money?” We continue to distribute our collection of specially designed coins with a nominal value of 1 iuvo. Each of them contains two seeds of an ash tree that our partners and friends can plant at a site they choose in the spring, which we believe is a real investment in the future.
We continue to move forward with the conviction that good things are going to happen to iuvo in 2019.
