According to a survey conducted by the P2P lending platform Robo.cash, more than a third of P2P investors expect the industry to recover by the end of this year. Investors see regular payments and a decrease in the number of loan defaults as two main signs of the market‘s recovery.
37.7% of investors believe that the P2P lending market will regain its pre-crisis volumes by the end of 2020. 36% are of the opinion that this will happen only in the first half of next year, and just 10.9% of respondents think that the market will recover only by the end of 2021.
Curiously, 44.6% of German-speaking respondents tend to think that the market will recover only in the first half of 2021. Meanwhile, the majority of English-speaking participants (36.1%) expect that it will happen by the end of 2020.
According to 30.3% of investors, the main sign of the market recovery will be the restoration of regular payments to investors by the loan originators and P2P platforms, which have suffered liquidity issues. The outflow of investments from P2P platforms due to the massive withdrawal of funds by investors hesitating to reinvest was one of the factors. Still, the introduction of repayment holidays in some countries and the crisis which has left numerous borrowers unemployed and therefore, insolvent have become the most crucial for the lenders. Thus, 26.3% of the surveyed believe that a noticeable decrease in the number of default loans will be a sure sign of recovery.
Sergey Sedov, CEO of Robocash Group, comments on the data: “Despite the crisis of the first months of the year, in summer, the market is resuming its growth just as we expected. In May, the market began to grow, and in June, the growth rate increased by another 19%. We can predict that the platform will come back to its pre-crisis level of funding within 2-3 months, and the recovery of the whole market may well happen by the end of 2020. This generally complies with our investors‘ expectations.”
