PeerBerry review: short term loans with 12% return


If you like Swaper and RoboCash, you're going to love PeerBerry! PeerBerry provides short-term consumer loans with full buyback guarantee. For me, interest has been a high 12% too!

Peerberry overview

History

Originally, PeerBerry was a daughter company of Aventus Group and even still, many of the loans provided on PeerBerry originate from the previous parent. Therefore, it would not be right to talk about PeerBerry without talking about Aventus Group as well.

Aventus Group was founded in 2009. In their own words, they are "A group of innovative digital loan providers leading financial progress of European and Asian clients since 2009." Aventus Group owns and operates a multitude of loan originators, such as pujcka7, smartpozyczka, pozyczkaplus, niewielkapozyczka, Credit Plus, Credit Star, Eurostar finance and Auto Money. 

PeerBerry was only founded in 2017, offering loans only from Aventus Group in the beginning. They've since added loan originators outside of Aventus Group as well.

Today, PeerBerry is a standalone operation, but with naturally deep ties to Aventus Group.

Team

The team of PeerBerry isn't huge. 7 people according to LinkedIn work there. Perhaps the most interesting of them is the current CEO Arūnas Lekavičius. Prior to PeerBerry, Arūnas has worked long at 4finance and DNB. He's clearly got the right kind of background for this.

Before Arūnas, the CEO of PeerBerry was Ausra Ciupliene. who has since been appointed the CEO of another Lithuanian peer lending platform, SAVY. That's maybe another one to look out for.

So not a huge operation, but in all honesty, in such an operational model most of the operations should be either automated or outsourced.

How PeerBerry works

Operational model

The operational model of PeerBerry is to me identical to that of Mintos: brokering loans between loan originators and investors. Loan originators issue loans and PeerBerry then helps refinance those loans with private investor's money.

PeerBerry interest rates

PeerBerry claims they have up to 13.7% interest rates. They also state that the average annual investment yield has been 11.51%. My personal portfolio has yielded close to 12% so far, so close to average.

That's actually really nice. Try out my PeerBerry compound interest calculator to see how that return would grow over time. It's actually pretty impressive.


PeerBerry buyback guarantee

All loans on PeerBerry come with a full buyback guarantee provided by the loan originator. The buyback guarantee covers also any accrued interest for delayed loans. 

In case you have lent money to a borrower that can't pay back, the loan originator is obligated to purchase the loan back in 60 days, including the interest you've lost.

Since the loans are so short on PeerBerry, this might still mean you lose a bit. You might lose on the opportunity of not having your funds invested while you wait for the buyback guarantee to kick in.

PeerBerry additional guarantee

PeerBerry has understood that buyback guarantee only works if the loan originator stays solvent. As some of the loan originators on PeerBerry are quite small, but they belong to larger groups (Aventus Group and Gofingo), PeerBerry agreed that the Aventus Group will vouch for the smaller loan originators under its brand. This then applies to some Aventus Group loan originators, not Gofingo.

That's still quite nice. I feel like I don't need to avoid refinancing those loans, if the group has got my back.

PeerBerry risks

As always, investing carries risk. I've written about peer lending risks before, but they're always good to review thoroughly.

There's very little liquidity risk with PeerBerry as loans are extremely short term. Even if a loan gets delayed and the buyback kicks in, it should take a maximum of 90 days before your precious money is returned to you. There's no secondary market and you cannot sell your loans back (like I did with my FastInvest account), but still, liquidity is fairly good.

There's always some platform risk, but I'd consider that to be low. PeerBerry is reputable and has a great track record. I can't imagine the platform vanishing. There should always be a buyer for a platform like PeerBerry. Sure, a Black Swan event might destroy everything, but I'll say unlikely.

Credit risk per se isn't really an issue at all due to the full buyback guarantee, but that only works if the loan originator doesn't become insolvent. That stuff has happened before, and it will happen again. I wouldn't be surprised if some of PeerBerry's used loan originators got into trouble over the next year.

So that's the biggest risk, that's how you can lose money on PeerBerry: by refinancing loans from low quality loan originators. Steering clear from that should reduce risk in my opinion. Let's see a little later how to mitigate that risk.

Investing on PeerBerry

How to sign up on PeerBerry

Signing up is easy:
  1. You head over to https://www.peerberry.com and click on the large green button Start Investing.
  2. Fill in your details. You'll need to provide e.g. the identification number of your passport.
  3. Wire money to your account (you'll get the instructions from PeerBerry)
  4. Set up auto invest (or invest manually if that's what you want.
So pretty basic. Follows exactly the same pattern as the rest of the platforms.

PeerBerry Auto Invest Settings

  1. Name: call it whatever
  2. Portfolio size: How many euros will be invested before the profile is full.
  3. Maximum investment in one loan: Too small a value and there will be cash drag. Too high a value and your returns might fluctuate a bit. I like to set this to about 1/100 of the invested amount and increase it if there's cash drag.
  4. Interest rate: You know what this means. Being too greedy here might mean acquiring more loans from lower quality loan originators.
  5. Remaining loan term: All of the loans so far that I've seen on PeerBerry have been extremely short term (a month?), but I still use a max here just to be safe things can't change without me knowing.
  6. Remaining principal amount: How much is there left to be financed. I have left this blank.
  7. Minimum funds in account: Put a number here if you want to keep a cash balance on your account. I don't.
  8. Loan status: I've chosen to invest only in current loans, but I don't mind late loans if it avoids any future cash drag.
  9. Country: Do you feel some countries are safer? I don't filter by country.
  10. Loan originator: I've so far been lazy and just invested in all loan originators. However, by choosing only better quality ones you should be able to reduce your risk.
  11. Buyback guarantee: All loans are with buyback guarantee, but, I still keep this on, just in case.
  12. Do you want to reinvest?: If you leave this off, interest and paid-back principal will not be reinvested into loans.
Now you know all there is to know about PeerBerry auto invest settings.

PeerBerry loan originators

It's important to note that a vast loan volume on PeerBerry comes from Aventus Group. But this isn't actually a bad thing. 

Aventus Group is doing really well financially. The awesome folks over at explorep2p studied PeerBerry's loan originators and in that article mention Aventus Group has almost 20 million in equity and have made 5.8 million profit in the first half of 2019! That is insane. A backing like that makes a big difference to me.

So the data table by explorep2p is really good and you should check that out. Here's a list I like at the moment: Pujcka7.cz, Creditplus.ua, SOS Credit.cz, Kredit7.kz, Euro Groshi, Lithome, Automoney, Sloncredit.ua, Creditstar.ru, Belka Credit, 100 tenge, Credit7.ua, Eurostar Finance.

Full disclosure

I've just now invested over 5,000€ on PeerBerry and I really like it. I find it great to have something else to diversify my very short term consumer loans to in addition to RoboCash and Swaper, so if there's any prolonged cash drag, I can easily rebalance. The returns have been great, too.

It's not as great as Mintos, but it's pretty great still. I'm giving PeerBerry a solid four stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐ for stable performance and great liquidity. If PeerBerry could get a larger network of different, high quality loan originators, that could earn them the missing star from me.

Here's my PeerBerry internal rate of return a bit above 12%. This is prior to adding 4,000€ to the account.


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