Second half of 2020 – accomplishments and plans for 2021

The second half of the year 2020 was surely more stable as the changes weren’t as unexpected and we all had some time to adapt to the new normal. Swaper did well, too – by the end of last month our investors had earned a total of 2 942 302 EUR in cumulative interest, which is 40% more compared to the same time last year. Besides that, we are humbled that our passion to create a great platform was awarded again with a title for the Best Loan Marketplace Platform 2020 by Wealth & Finance International. This was all clearly achieved thanks to a good teamwork effort and fast reaction when pandemic first hit us.

Among other important changes, we were fortunate to welcome our new hands-on CEO Indrek to the team, who has prepared and is executing a new growth strategy for Swaper. It is always refreshing to have new people in the team to offer different perspectives. But it’s especially rewarding when a character with an impressive toolset of previously gained experience meets with an already established organization to help it grow even better. By looking at the to-do list, we can say that 2020 was big, but 2021 is going to be even bigger!

Website changes and Annual Investor Survey

Communication is the secret key to success and we know it. Just recently we added a separate page for the Definitive Guide to P2P Investments – just to make the whole knowledge of concept and terminology easily accessible and understandable for every investor. Perhaps you have also noticed that we have a new tradition to publish a few-minute-read blog post on every Monday about popular topics related to investing and monetary education, such as compound interest, early retirement, BuyBack and differences between P2P vs Stock Market Investing. We will of course continue to update you monthly and quarterly about the latest stats and news from Swaper.

But communication is of course a two-way street. We know that in order to truly succeed, we need to hear the voice of people who actually use Swaper on a daily basis – our investors. Therefore, we conducted an Annual Investor Survey back in October to gain some insight about the features that our investors appreciate about Swaper the most and what the main concerns or shortcoming you’d like us to work on. We were glad to see that the survey was quite successful in a sense that we had plenty of investors taking part and expressing their honest opinions. We are here to listen, analyze and work on all of them.

One of the biggest things we have been working on lately is the performance of Auto-Invest Portfolio, which our participants voted as their favorite way of investing. We have studied our customers needs and found that the best way to please most of our investors is by developing two different AI-s – one that is easy and straightforward by default and a more advanced one for users who like to set their own rules. The Easy Invest Portfolio would be automatically set by Swaper in such a way that your funds get invested as quickly and as profitably as possible. The more advanced AI would on the other hand give you the option to pick a range of rules from scratch, e.g origin, type and interest rate of the loans or the maximum amount you’d like to invest per loan.

Another important aspect that has created some resentment to our investors is that we should have more loans available on the platform. We are excited to tell you that Swaper will go through a major change this year to enable this. We have decided to bring in new loan originators and we are currently in the process of recruiting and onboarding these loan companies, while making sure that both our IT and compliance teams could prepare the platform for this massive change. It will also demand user interface changes in order to grant enough information and allow a good overview of new loan providers and how it all works.

Steps to help us offer highest security to our investors

Bringing in new loan originators will also help spreading any risks which would in turn make us stronger. But there are more big things that we are preparing for, such as regulating Swaper. Estonia is currently in the process of regulating the markets and it will most likely start coming into force from the end of the year. Swaper team is already preparing for the potential changes as we urge to be the first in line to gain the license. We believe that it would help us demonstrate the security and transparency of our platform – which are some of the core values of our business.

For extra layer of security on the website, we are working on adding two-factor authentication this year. Besides the big projects and our day-to-day work, we are also constantly monitoring and analyzing the website so that it would be as user friendly, logical and easy to use as possible. Some UX changes we have already planned, will be implemented soon.

We are excited to tell you that we are once again nominated for another award. If you are happy with the work we are doing and what Swaper can offer, then we would be grateful for any support with winning the Best Crowdlending Platform at BankingCheck & eKomi Award 2021.We have done it once in 2019 and with your help we can surely do it again. It just takes a moment to vote and leave feedback – but your vote would mean the world for us!

There is currently a lot of work to do as we aim to be one of the best in business. We hope you know that we are truly open for improvement and appreciative of every piece of advice or suggestions. It would be a dream come true for us to have our investors to feel as part of our team and help us create one of the most secure, trusted and easy-to-use investment marketplaces in the whole wide world. Therefore, let’s keep in touch to keep building the best version of Swaper!