At Creditstar we understand that these can be challenging times for everyone. Not only are people concerned for their health, but it is, understandably, a disorientating time for P2P investors. However, the message from Creditstar is to keep calm and capitalise on higher interest levels offered by loan originators. Here’s how we recommend investors to navigate financially through these uncertain times.
What Creditstar is doing
We are in an advantageous position as we have the experience of how to deal with our loan portfolio clients during the time of crisis, as we successfully came through the financial crisis of 2008. Our experience is that being proactive with clients and offering reasonable flexibility results in a win-win situation for both our business in terms of loan portfolio quality and customers in terms of paying their loan payments on time.
How we are helping our customers:
– favourable terms on grace periods and extensions
– discounts on fees
– flexibility with modifying repayment schedules to make smaller monthly instalments
– we have extended the soft (in-house) collection period in order to postpone hard collection in most cases during the crisis
– we are in the middle of rolling out free grace periods offering to frontline health-care workers who are responding to coronavirus
– we keep the credit lines opened for our repeat customers to provide them back-up money during the time of need
As we understand that these can be challenging times for our clients, we are doing all of the abovementioned initiatives to strengthen our client relationships and to help our clients through these difficult times.
Government Stimulus Measures
We are monitoring our target countries’ governments, who have revealed a range of stimulus policies and measures, in response to the growing threat presented to the economies by COVID-19. These stimulus measures, which are likely to be expanded in the near future, are aimed at assisting both consumers and businesses to cope with the effects of the quarantine measures to the economy.
What we recommend to P2P investors
We believe in the power of people and know that we’re stronger together. We also believe that now is not the time for us to panic and leave our customers out in cold, rather, keep calm, be reasonable, flexible and create a win-win situation. This is exactly what we recommend our P2P investors also to do – keep investing in loans and earning higher interest rates that the loan originators, including Creditstar, are currently offering. We understand that P2P investors seek a good return on investment. With P2P investors funding, we can do more in supporting our regular clients in difficult times. If the funds are withdrawn from the platforms, funds for our clients will also be limited. This is a chance to do good while also earning higher returns. It is up to all of us to hold together to get successfully through these turbulent times.
Creditstar’s pending payments on Mintos platform
We have received questions from investors in regards our recent pending payments on Mintos platform. We are open to explain. After the Estonian government declared an emergency on 13th of March, Creditstar saw a surge from repeat customers applying for additional credit on their Monefit credit lines. At the time, our IT exchange with Mintos platform worked in a way that in all cases of any additional credit taken by the customer, we re-purchased the previous credit amount fully from the platform and reloaded the whole amount to the platform to be newly invested in, but in reality, these loans were actually not fully repaid by the customers but eligible customers were issued more credit within the credit limit. We have a similar issue in other countries with customer extensions, whereby our IT system integration currently does not support the extension API and loans that in reality are extended by the customer are fully re-purchased from the platform, but the customer has extended the loan and not repaid the loan amount.
During these weeks, our IT team has been working around the clock to repair this information exchange issue and make sure that the loans that are unpaid by the customers are not rebought from the platform, so we can reduce the amount of pending payments. We aim to release the improvements soon and we hope that this has not caused too much trouble to our investors and can guarantee our team is cooperating with the platform to solve these issues as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience, continued investments and stay well,
Team Creditstar
