Supporting SMEs and the real economy
With over 23 million companies providing more than 90 million jobs, SMEs are the backbone of the European economy.
As a European FinTech company, October’s mission is to finance businesses better. Our technology makes it simple and fast to say yes to more small and medium businesses requesting funding locally, while containing the level of risk and improving the return of investors.
So far, more than 30,000 retail lenders and several significant institutional lenders such as the European Investment Fund (EFI), among others, have lent €740M to entrepreneurial projects through October, earning €54M in interest. More than 2,300 projects have been financed thanks to this hybrid investment model. Discover the success stories of Lot61, Behring and other borrowers on October, who fund their growth with the support of our retail lenders community.
Contribute to the growth of local economies and boost your savings
If you are looking at investment opportunities, why not investing in SMEs? This way, you can make a concrete contribution to supporting the European real economy in exchange for a return on your investments.
But… how can you do that?
Lending platforms like October allow individuals to invest their money in a useful and profitable way to support the local businesses of their choice. At the same time, they help them find new, simple and effective sources of funding independents of banks.
Individuals looking at boosting their savings can find in SME lending a new asset class to complement their portfolio. Depending on their risk profile, lenders can choose to invest in projects with annual interest rate between 2% and 9,9%, assuming the risk in case of loss. For each project you support, you will receive your repayments (capital and interest) on a regular basis, depending on the amortisation schedule of your different loans.
We select quality SMEs for you.
By combining the best of technology and financial analysis, we select the right SMEs for our lenders.
Once the October’s Credit Committee has approved a project, it is previewed on the platform for 48 hours. The project description page has 6 elements that lenders can check before the project opens for lending.
The key figures, with the annual interest rate of the project, the total amount to be financed and the duration of the loan in months. Then the project’s score based on the risk level (between A+ to C-, from high to low creditworthiness). A brief description of the project, the situation and the history of the company follows. The last part of the project description includes information about the scoring model used to analyse the project. Learn more about the projects selection.
Choose projects you want to fund and diversify your portfolio
You can lend directly through your desktop or mobile phone. You can choose the projects you want to finance and the amount you want to dedicate. From 20€ per project, it’s up to you! With the October app, available for iOS and Android, it’s easy to monitor your portfolio wherever you are.
We offer you a way to diversify your portfolio by countries, choosing from French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch companies operating in all sectors. You can also spread your investment over several industries and different credit scores to build a balanced portfolio and have a more consistent return on your loans.
Since you are in control of your portfolio, your investment strategy can be more or less risk-averse. The higher the risk, the higher the return, as well as the risk of capital loss. No investment is safe and the companies you lend to may default.
For this reason, we recommend you to diversify by spreading your investment over multiple loans. This way you can minimise the impact of a default. In fact, the interest you earn on healthy projects may counterbalance the capital loss on your projects in default. In other words, the more diverse your portfolio, the more stable your return will be. Learn more on how to diversify your investment.
We align our interests and focus on transparency
We are the first users of our technology. The October’s management team automatically lends to almost all the companies presented on the platform. This allows them to align their interest with yours.
We are committed to being transparent in everything we do. Every month, we publish all the data on projects financed on October, our key figures and our performance results on our Statistics page. In addition, every quarter we will share with you a special newsletter with data on our lending activity over the past three month. We will also publish an article focusing on a relevant statistic for our community of lenders. You can find more information on our blog.
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