2022 has been an eventful year for October. We couldn’t have predicted this crazy year, full of changes and unexpected news. Regardless, thanks to our community of lenders, our new loan origination was our second best ever. In our open letter to the community we already mentioned why, so we won’t repeat ourselves in this article. Instead, we’ll dive into the data and give a retrospective of our loans and our lending base.
A new market environment
In 2022, 698 projects were financed by around 42,000 active lenders for a total amount of €158m.
This last year represented a new paradigm for October. During this complex year, we experienced a record first quarter but a difficult second and third quarter.
We decided to increase our interest rates to match the current market and to be able to match lenders’ expectations. In addition we have changed the frequency that we review the interest rate that we charge our borrowers.
During last year the State-guaranteed loans offer in France and in The Netherlands, for companies affected for the Covid-19 crisis, ended. However, we were able to introduce new guarantees from Bpifrance and the Dutch state, the BMKB guarantee. In general, the share of loans that are covered by a guarantee, personal, corporate or state, has increased. Around 70% of our projects are covered by a security. Securities can reduce the risk of capital loss, because we can fall back on the guarantor or the collateral in case of a default.
Also, we focused in the ESG principles (Environmental, Social and Governance). For October, ESG is key. We want to back our borrowers to achieve a positive socioeconomic impact on the community, as well as on the whole European real economy. Moreover, lenders also value sustainability and responsible investments they know will have a real impact. Our biggest achievement? Implementing a fully automated yet detailed ESG report in our credit analysis.
And last but not least, we have acquired Credit.fr to strengthen our community of retail lenders (now 40,000 people strong) while having the pleasure to welcome Tikehau Capital among our shareholders.
Across countries
October has always had a European heart. Lenders from everywhere can support the growth of European SMEs on the platform. Of course, countries where October is active (France, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands and Germany) represent the majority of the community (90% of active lenders).
This last year, we welcomed 10,000 lenders from Credit.fr to our platform. Now we have 42,000 active lenders. The average investment per project was €53 and together all retail lenders have injected €22.7M in the European real economy in 2022 alone. Ninobe Servicios Energeticos SL received the most support from 4,976 lenders for a total of €292,580.
Customer first
The Lenders team welcomed new faces: Jorn became the new Head of Customer Success (Learn about Jorn’s experience here), Lara takes care of Italian lenders and Tania and Nicolas join Fanny to give support to all French-speaking lenders. We hope to give you the best experience and support on the platform this year too.
In 2022, October welcomed 3,751 new active lenders, who lent at least to one project. They came from all over the world, but were mainly from France.
During this year, lenders started 25,065 conversations and were answered by the Lenders team with a satisfaction rate of 83%. Most of the conversations with lenders were about the transactions (20% of the conversations), updating banking information (15%) and information concerning the opening of an October account (13%). This is a slight change from last year when the opening of your account was the main topic. Conversation topics are a very important data for the customer success team to improve your experience on the platform.
October’s Data Dive
Thanks to your feedback, we launched a series of blogs about statistics last year, to help understand the different data on the platform: October’s Data Dive. The most viewed article were Our key figures and Understanding the default rate. Our statistics are available at any time on the website and are updated monthly and in 2023 we will continue with our Data Dive series.
Going into 2023
In 2022 October bet on its growing team and its technology! October raised new funds to lend, welcomed new lenders and recruited new talents around Europe. Overall, 74 new people joined the October adventure. If there’s anything that we learned from the last 12 months, it’s that we can’t predict the future. But, we have all the ingredients to consolidate our strength and keep on always improving in 2023!