TruePillars current performance in COVID-19

It is apparent that COVID-19 will have impacts that extend beyond health implications of the virus.  Economies are locked down around the world with many people currently out of work or working significantly reduced hours due to the forced closures of or restrictions on businesses.  The flow on impact of these measures designed to stop the spread is the ability of both small businesses and individuals to earn a sustainable income and thus repay loans they may have.  This impact will be exacerbated when the economy reopens as people currently out of work no longer have the same disposable income available to them to spend on goods and services. It is thus reasonable to expect, therefore, that the current economic situation will also have a flow on effect into the general lending market of which the peer to peer lending is part. 

I have chosen to breakdown the performance of my TruePillars portfolio in the first instance, as the loans to small businesses have shown the first signs of the impact of COVID-19.  

Before getting into the current performance, it is important to understand some general stats related to the portfolio since the beginning of my investment journey in August 2018. Over the 21 months, I have had investments in 203 different loans on the platform.  In that time, I have experienced one default that has been fully finalised and saw the outstanding investment value in that loan written off. This was only 0.15% of the current portfolio value. On the flipside, 16.4% of my current portfolio exists as a direct result of the interest earnt from loans.

The current statistics of are as of mid-May 2020 and are a snapshot in time. As you can expect, these stats are changing regularly with activity across the portfolio of loans happening daily.  

Active Loans – I currently have investments in 159 different loans.  The difference is between the 203 total invested and currently active loans comes from a mixture of activities.  Majority of these 44 loans I no longer have an active stake in are a result of being paid out (either at full term or paid out early), I’ve sold off the Investment (my strategy for loans I considered higher risk) and the one default that has been fully closed out.  Interestingly almost half of these loans (18 loans) have been paid out since February this year.

Overdue – There are currently two loans overdue with the outstanding loan values at 1.2% of the total portfolio.  One loan is a week overdue while the other is at one day.  This fluctuates regularly from nil to maybe three loans.  Its something I keep an eye on to see how they are going.  

Agreed Deferrals – (A loan status to show investors where agreed payment deferrals have been made between TruePillars and the borrower). This number has been steadily growing over the past few months.  When I first started collecting data for this blog about a month ago, loans for an agreed deferral was 47 (about 26.5% of the portfolio), This has now increased to 54 loans equating to about 31.6% of the portfolio.  Looking through the loans in this category, they all relate to industries most affected by COVID-19 (i.e. cafes, restaurants, retail stores, gyms, etc).  These are the ones I will be watching moving forward as the economy continues to open back up.

Credit Monitoring – (A loan status to show investors loans that TruePillars are monitoring for their ability to pay back) Currently there are no loans in this category.  A month ago, there were 12 loans equating to about 7% of the portfolio.  These loans have changed status back to Active, Agreed Deferrals and one went into Default.

Defaulted – I currently have three defaulted loans that are going through the process of debt recovery.  The outstanding value of these loans currently sit at 1.3% of the portfolio and are currently counted in the 163 active loans. Until these loans are finalised, the full loss will not be known (any recovery of capital from the sale of assets that may be received).  To put this in perspective the first went into default in January (one could argue it was prior to the impact of COVID-19) with the third happening within the month.  Defaults are certainly something I will be keeping an eye on to help understand the impact this will have on my portfolio.

Cash – The percentage of my portfolio sitting as cash has been steadily growing as of the last few months and currently sits at 8.5%.  Normally I like to keep this as low as possible as you do not earn interest on this amount.  However, new loans issued have been dropping off with only three being put forward in the last month and a half.  My approach at the moment is to not invest in the secondary market at this point in time (as there has not been anything on the secondary market that I don’t already have a stake in) to minimise the risk of these aged loans.

It is times like these where the diversification strategy is more important than ever to minimise the risk of loss.  In my case, my current largest exposure to a single loan is only 1.8% and this percentage is shrinking.  In addition, there are now only seven loans over 1% of the total portfolio.  This diversification has allowed for the spread of risk across multiple sectors and industries.  The figure below shows the breakup across the industries I have exposure to.  The more this is diversified the better for protection you have from downturns in any one industry.

An update on the April performance saw an overall annualised return of 9.2%.  This is still a good return and about 1% lower than the March’s 10.3% return. I do expect May returns to be a little lower again this month, however not by much. Future months are impossible to predict at this point, but with restrictions easing across Australia, I would expect conditions for affected businesses starting to improve.

These are hard times for many small businesses.  One thing I have admired is the approach True Pillars has taken and the open communication it has demonstrated with both borrowers and investors on helping businesses through this time.  While I may lose some interest along the way in the short term, I would prefer to see the business survive in the short term and replay the loan in the long term.

TruePillars Platform Changes

To get started back into the swing of writing after a bit of break from writing (my investing has been continuing as normal) I thought I would take this opportunity to share some new developments happening on the TruePillars platform. At the end of October, the PDS was updated to reflect some new changes to the Platform. I recommend everyone have a read of the PDS (for latest PDS there is a link at the bottom of the home page) to ensure you are familiar with what you are investing in, how it works and what risks you are taking on.

Some of the key highlights and changes on platform for me are

• Changes to the security ratings on new loans
• Auto bid now also purchases loans on the secondary market
• Part interest received when you sell loan units
• New TruePillars Select loans
• New loan status definitions in the investments tab of your portfolio

Changes to the security ratings on new loans

This change is adding a different element to the rating of a loan. Previously the rating was only on the quality of credit worthiness of the loan (ability to continually pay or having a strong income verse expenses of the business). The new security rating adds some additional guidance of the assets that support the loan application. This security used in the unfortunate event of default of the business where it can be sold off to recover the capital to investors. The security is rated on a score of A to E.  Loans with an A rated security are better equipped to recoup investor capital than those rated E. It should be noted that Loans issued prior to the addition of this security rating category have been automatically rated an E regardless of the potential security of older loans. 

This is a great change and allows for investors to make more informed choices when deciding to invest in a loan. 

Changes to Auto Bid

Auto bid was used to automatically place bids into new loans on your behalf based on your criteria. I’ve been using this feature for a while to make my investing easier.  This has now been extended to the secondary marketplace where the autobid will purchase loans on the secondary market which meet your loan criteria.

While this is good to help people automate their portfolios, there are a few features I would like to see changed / added.  The first is if you have purchased secondary market loans manually (my portfolio has quite a few), the autobid does not recognize you already have investments in the loan and will purchase it again if they become available.  These means that my strategy to keep loans at set investment values has been put out of kilter. The system also does not recognize if you have sold out of a loan as it automatically repurchased a couple I had sold out of (one of which is now on my defaulted list).  

In addition to changing the above I would like to see an option to choose whether autobid purchased from the secondary market or not.  Given the current climate with COVID-19 TruePillars has disabled autobid for the moment.  You can still manually purchase new and secondary market loans with my current straight only to purchase new. 

TruePillars Select Loans

In December last year TruePillars started offering the purchase of Select Loans as the result of the purchase of an existing loan book from another bank.  This was on the back of strong Investor demand for loans that was outstripping new loans becoming available on the platform. These loans were issued by another bank meaning the loans are part way through repayments.  There is a great video explaining the Select loans here. 

You can easily identify the Select loans in the Market place as loan icons contain a watermarked “S” in the top right corner.  

New Loan Status definitions

As part of continually improving the communication to investors and help draw the distinction between loans two new categories have been added.  The list of definitions that can now be applied to loans you are invested in are as follows:

• Active
• Attempting Collection
• Overdue
• Credit monitoring (New)
• Deferral agreed (New)
• Defaulted

 The new categories allows investors better visibility at a glance which loans are overdue and which loans have been proactive and worked with Truepillars to come to an agreement on deferred payments.  This change is even more relevant in the current climate of COVID and helps us quickly view those businesses currently experiencing some hardship.  Detailed descriptions of the different loan statuses can be found on the Investor FAQs under the question What does Loan Status Mean?

TruePillars is continuing to evolve and grow.  While I would prefer to see a few tweaks to some of the new functions, I’m happy to see the site refining their product offering to make it easier and better for investors. 

Pete2Peer Portfolio Performance Update

While I have had a break from writing due to some other commitments, with the current climate and uncertainty due to COVID-19, I’m sure all are interested in how the P2P portfolio is performing. The investments to date have been ticking along nicely and while it is early days for COVID-19, three of the four platforms I invest in have shown little signs of reduced performance to date. This is something I will be watching closely over the next few months. We will break down the individual platform performance and an overview of the whole portfolio.

TruePillars

In the last few months I’ve adjusted my focus on loan diversity and have been working to lower my individual exposure to a single loan: I’ve made great headway in this regard with currently over 165 different loans and a current max exposure of 1.7%. New loans I purchase into now only account for approximately 0.7% of my TruePillars portfolio.
I’ve sliced data two ways to show the makeup of loan grades and the distribution of the industries I invest in. TruePillars rates loans on a grade of one through five, with five considered the lowest risk. Below is the distribution of loan grades in my portfolio.

With 165 loans it allows for diversification across multiple industries. Breaking these out based on the standard industries against each loan, the following pie chart shows my investment portfolio distribution.

Overall my TruePillars account is progressing well with some steady returns of just over 12%. However, this platform specialising in small business loans has seen an increase in loans that have agreed deferrals of payments to help businesses affected by legislated COVID closures (e.g. gyms, cafes, etc). While last month’s income was down a little, I fully expect this month’s income to be down close to 40%. I will be posting separate blogs shortly to discuss the impacts I’ve seen on each platform starting with TruePillars.

MoneySpot

This platform has been a consistent earner for us with no active involvement required from myself achieving annualised returns of around 12.8%. March 2020 was no different pulling in 13.22%. The one figure I will be keeping a close eye on is the default rate which currently sites at 5.77% for March. This was 5.33% in January.

RateSetter

I have continued to add to this platform in fits and burst which has consequently resulted in the returns currently a little depressed on some months.  RateSetter is tracking close to where I expect it to be just below the 8% mark.  All my investment to date has been in the 5-year lending market for maximum return. Over the next few months, I expect to continue to add some funds to increase the overall portfolio weight of this platform and at this stage has not shown any adverse effects from the last few months.

OurMoneyMarket

This platform I’ve made the call to not actively use and will see out the current investments only.  As such I’m only on every month to track its progress and withdraw my available funds.  The platform has achieved an average annualised return of 10%.  Last month saw an annualised rate of 11.06%. 

Overall Performance

To keep track of the individual performance of each platform, I track them on a single graph below and then aggregate the results to give my overall portfolio returns.

We can see that the overall returns of the portfolio are tracking between 10 and 12%, averaging 11.2% return for the previous 12 months. Part of the driver for the return is the split in allocation weighting to each platform. The following graph below shows I still have about 70% of my funds in two platforms. While this is changing, I’ve not actively added as much over the last few months to even up the distribution.  You’ll also note I will be tapering off the fourth platform out of the mix.

I feel the full impact of COVID-19 on the loan space is yet to fully materialise so am keenly watching the space to see how my investments continue to perform. As with all investments there is risk which is why we diversify into multiple loans and platforms. 

Hope all are faring well and staying safe in these crazy times. 

Our Money Market updated user experience

In this post I wanted to give an update on my user experiences with Our Money Market from when I first started using the platform back in April 2019 (First user impressions here).  During this time I’ve continued to invest and grow my portfolio of loans on the platform, but it has not been without its challenges. 

I initially found the platform’s responses prompt, however since that time responses have slowed down where account inquiries and questions are taking weeks to get resolved. This is coupled with several prompts along the way to get to a satisfactory outcome.  When you consider a business like this, you need both investors and borrowers alike to have seamless experiences.  Unfortunately this has not been my experience to date.

While I appreciate the platform is still young, I found the user interface not as slick as other platforms out there offering the same service.  On multiple occasions, the platform appears to glitch and committed funds get “stuck” in no man’s land.  By this I mean funds committed to loans that do not proceed, disappear off the pending loans list (a list of the loans you have funded but not yet active), however the funds do not become available to reinvest.  You can see the missing funds are still linked to your account through the summary total of committed funds but is mismatched against what loans you can see as pending.  This is a problem I experienced multiple times with the latest issue taking almost four weeks and multiple follow-ups with Our Money Market to resolve. 

For me, one of the drawcards of Peer to Peer lending is the ability to become a low time commitment investment.  My experiences on Our Money Market have been different to this expectation.  While I didn’t take stats, it felt like a large number of the loans I committed funds to, did not proceed.  This occurred in two ways, majority being that funds were returned prior to the closing of funding window.  I believe this is because the borrower changed their mind about taking out the loan. The second was that the loan did not get fully funded by the end of the open funding window (typically 14 days), thus funds are returned.  This is a result of not enough investor activity.

Because of this I was spending a lot more time on the site to try and get funds invested than what I though was reasonable having to continually re-invest the same funds before I got a return.  The platform does have an auto invest feature that I thought would help reduce this time, so I set it up (something that is not a super intuitive process).  In the months auto invest was active, it did not make a single investment on my behalf.  While I continued to adjust setting, I still could not get it to work.  Feedback from Our Money Market was there was nothing wrong with the Auto Invest.

While I understand Our Money Market is still a young business, I feel I’ve been very persistent and patient working through the challenges with the platform expecting them to be resolved.  However based on the culmination of these experiences to date, I’ve decided to no long actively use this platform at this stage.  I recognise this is only my experience using Our Money Market, thus I am interested to here from other people who has invested on the platform and the experiences they’ve had.