- Fully committed to helping mitigate the impact of the crisis on businesses, lending platform October announces measures to support European SMEs.
- Loans granted by October to SMEs in France, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands and Germany will enjoy a three-months freeze on capital repayment.
- 93% of lenders, retailed and institutional, have voted to support companies and their employees.
Lending platform October is closely monitoring the economic impact of Coronavirus on European companies. The spread of the virus will likely have severe consequences on SMEs, from slowdowns in production to unstable cashflows and future financial difficulties.
October is a European fintech born with the ambition of empowering businesses by simplifying their funding. In these extraordinary times, the platform wants to go further and be in the front line for helping SMEs preserve employment and recover quickly. Today, it announces a 3–months freeze of capital repayments for its 523 SMEs that borrowed through the platform, without any formalities or administrative process for the entrepreneurs.
This means that the maturity of their loans will be extended by 3 months and that the community of retail and institutional lenders will only be receiving interests for the period of April, May and June 2020. The capital freeze will be automatically activated without any paperwork.
This initiative is applied uniformly across all the countries where the platform is active. It is independent from any support measures that individual governments may decide to undertake in coming weeks. The platform is proud to enjoy the support of its institutional investors and more than 20.000 retail lenders who have expressed, through a vote, their willingness to help the real economy in such hard times.
The 3-month freeze of capital repayments also affects October’s Management which automatically lends to all projects alongside retail lenders. To date, over 12 million euros have been invested by the managers of the company. “Skin in the game” is a rule that has always forged October’s culture based on transparency and alignment of interests. In addition, October ****will waive fees to SMEs during the freeze period as a further sign of commitment.
“We want to take concrete steps, supported by our lenders and investors, to help European SMEs in the current market situation. We know that the best chance of getting our investment back is for companies to overcome the crisis. Preserving their cash is therefore key for the entire economy” comments Olivier Goy, Founder and CEO of October.
October is fully operational in all of our countries. We are 100% digital by design and therefore can function remotely without any issues in the business. We stay open and will assess all incoming application by the merit of their credit risk as we did before. We take into account potential impact the current situation might have on certain industries, but decide the risk case by case.