Bondora is an Estonian p2p lending platform; it facilitates lending between peers. On Bondora, Investors can set their portfolio manager risk level to Conservative, Balanced or Progressive. Using this setting investors, do not need to manually select each loan to invest in. There is a third way of automated investing on Bondora: BeePlus, this is a third party lending robot which can be customised. Jarmo Pertman the developer of BeePlus, explains how his landing robot works,
What is Bondora?
Bondora (https://bondora.com) is a peer-to-peer lending platform. You can read more about Bondora from their FAQ where they answer exactly to the same question: https://www.bondora.com/en?noredirect=1#faq
How does Beeplus (with a capitalized P in here and on!) compliment Bondora?
BeePlus is a service created by me and built upon Bondora’s API. API is an interface
for systems to communicate each other and as far as I know then Bondora is (still, over 1.5 years ago) still the only peer-to-peer lending platform offering a public API. API lets you build other, possibly 3rd party, systems to operate on top of your service. In other words, API lets everyone else (if its public, of course) who know how to program a separate services/apps on top of your business. BeePlus is using Bondora’s API to manage your portfolio automatically, so you don’t have to. This means that you can invest into loans on primary and secondary market and sell loans to secondary market.
What made you create Beeplus?
I’ve been an investor on Bondora for years now. When they announced at the end of the year 2015 that they will have a public API, I wanted to give it a try if it could be helpful to myself. After I saw that it is quite helpful for myself, I decided to offer it to any investor too, totally free of charge. Since developing BeePlus took quite a big of a chunk of my free time and keeping it running costs money, then I decided to end this ironic situation where only one paying for the service was me and made it non-free.
The definition of defaults on Bondora has been controversial, do you have an opinion on this?
I would rather not comment on Bondora’s definition of their business. I suggest to contact them directly regarding any questions like these.
What is the difference between the Bondora auto investor and Beeplus?
Biggest difference between them is that at Bondora’s auto-invest (they call it Portfolio Manager or PM in short) functionality you as an investor cannot basically choose where to invest, but with BeePlus you have quite a many filters to specify for each rule so that your funds would be invested only loans, which you actually want. In other words, with BeePlus you’re in control, but same cannot be said about Bondora’s PM.
Does Bondora coordinate changes to its API with third party service providers such as yours?
Unfortunately, this has been quite a big problem when it comes to Bondora’s communication about upcoming changes. It’s less of a problem lately since their API is quite mature at this point, but was more of a problem in the beginning. However, if anyone else plans to build a service like BeePlus (competition is more than welcome!) or anything similar, then I suggest adding good monitoring systems, and many safe-guard at source code level to keep service running.
How much does BeePlus cost?
BeePlus is free for the first 30 days, but after that, you need to subscribe for it to keep working. Its price is dynamic and consists of two parts – a fixed fee of 1.9€ and a 0.9% from the total of transactions processed by BeePlus within each billing cycle (30 days).
How do you stay on top of any changes that Bondora might implement?
I don’t know much about Bondora’s inner working or business strategies, but if I would be them, then I would move even more towards API to keep more time for concentrating on its core values, which is a peer-to-peer lending. API-s are a way to go in a nowadays world and I’m quite surprised that there’s not many yet available (at least I don’t know of any).
Will BeePlus expand to other service providers, if so which ones will be first?
As already mentioned in previous answers then I’m not aware of any services offering a public API yet and would not spread any rumours too. If any reader knows services like these and would like BeePlus to support these services, then please drop me an e-mail to beeplus@beeplus.me, and I’ll see what can be done.
For more information please visit Beeplus.me,
We thank Jarmo Pertman for the interview.
