Interest in P2P lending is growing steadily in Eastern Europe
Analysts of the P2P platform Robo.cash have studied the search activity associated with P2P lending in Europe. The results show that its relative popularity is nearly 5 times greater in Western than in Eastern Europe. Remarkably, while the interest in this segment in the East has been increasing steadily, it has remained almost the same in the West. Rapidly growing volumes of the East European market confirm the tendency – from 2015 to 2017 they increased by 153%.
The main reason for the bigger popularity of P2P lending in Western Europe is its faster development in the region. Thus, the TOP-3 countries by the number of P2P platforms in Europe include the UK (77 platforms), France and Germany (46 platforms in each). The leader among East European countries, Poland, ranks 12th with 15 P2P lending platforms.
Despite this, the absolute figures show a positive trend in Eastern Europe over the last 4 years, whereas in the West the search requests remain at the same level. This is supported by the fact that the East European market (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) has increased considerably from 2015 to 2017 – by 153% from €71 to €179m. In Southeastern Europe (Romania, Greece, Turkey, Slovenia, Greece, Serbia) it grew by 357.7% from €10 to €45m during the same period.
The rising popularity of P2P lending in some East European countries is also confirmed by the data of Robo.cash. Over the last six months, the number of Bulgarian investors on the platform has increased in 6.2 times, from 70 to 440. Recently, the country ranked third by this parameter following Germany and Spain.
Methodology:
To assess the popularity of P2P lending in Europe, the company used Google AdWords statistics on such search queries as “p2p lending”, “peer-to-peer lending”, “peer to peer lending”, “peer to peer loans”, “p2p loans”, “p2p kredite”, “p2p investing”, as well as related requests. The service reflects the average number of requests per month. To compare the relative popularity of P2P lending in regions, the data were calculated taking into account the size of the population.
