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Swedish peer-to-peer lending marketplace SaveLend is targeting 40 per cent revenue growth and a move into profitability this year, as it expands its investor offering across Europe.
The platform, which connects investors with a variety of loan originators from Sweden and Finland, received its EU crowdfunding licence at the end of last month – meaning it can now benefit from the new regulatory framework aimed at harmonising the industry across the bloc.
Chief executive and founder Ludwig Pettersson told Peer2Peer Finance News that SaveLend will now be looking to expand by attracting investors from across the EU.
“In terms of originators, we will probably stay in Sweden and Finland in 2023 and then will move from there,” he added.
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SaveLend acquired Finnish lender Fixura in 2021, meaning that it is now the oldest player in the Nordics, according to Pettersson.
The company’s focus this year is “profitable growth”, Pettersson said, although he added that “the most important thing for all P2P lenders right now is credit quality”.
“We launched an initial public offering in 2021 [on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market] and our goal was to grow,” he said. “Then we said at the beginning of 2022, let’s get profitable. We are almost there.”
SaveLend is forecasting 40 per cent revenue growth in 2023.
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Its parent company, SaveLend Group – which also runs an invoice financing platform – reported net revenues of SEK150.3m (£11.7m) and a SEK4m loss for 2022.
SaveLend currently has an outstanding loan book of around £100m, Pettersson said, and facilitated £30m to £40m of lending in the last quarter of 2022. Its originators offer a wide variety of loans including consumer credit, project finance, factoring, small business loans and import finance.
The platform has attracted more than 19,000 investors and reported an average investor return of 8.04 per cent for the 12 months to February 2023.
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