Swedish investment platform SaveLend has acquired Lendify, Lunar bank’s peer-to-peer business, following the latter’s decision to quit the sector.
Lunar, based in Denmark and with operations in Sweden and Norway, moved into the P2P market in the spring of 2021 with the takeover of Lendify in an all-stock transaction worth €100m (£87.3m).
The deal with SaveLend is expected to be completed this summer, with SaveLend taking over the P2P business in its entirety. There is no initial purchase price; instead, performance-based payments will be made to Lunar. These will be 50 per cent of revenues generated from 2023 up to 2027 from active investments included in the deal.
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“After careful evaluation, we see that significant investment in the P2P offering would be required to continue to provide the best user experience for our P2P customers and to scale the business,” said Mats Bergius Persson, country manager Sweden at Lunar.
“In SaveLend, we instead found the perfect partner as they only focus on developing the P2P portfolio for the benefit of the users.”
The acquisition adds around 17,000 active investors to SaveLend – of which about 10 per cent already invest on SaveLend’s platform – and 7,000 active borrowers.
Excluding synergy savings, the deal for the period 2023-2027 is expected to increase SaveLend’s turnover by around SEK 40m (£3.1m) and boost cash flow by about SEK 20m.
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“We are very excited to welcome investors and borrowers from Lunar to SaveLend Group,” said SaveLend chief executive Ludwig Pettersson. “We are confident that our new investors will appreciate our broader savings offering and award-winning platform.
“We delivered an average yield of 7.92 per cent over the past 12 months, and we have not had a negative month of yield on the platform since 2016.”
He added: “I see significant revenue synergies in reinvesting and scaling up newly added investors’ savings capital going forward. Thanks to our proprietary technology, we can acquire customer stocks in this efficient way.”
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