Grupeer

It all began when experienced and successful real estate developer Andrejs Kisiks was working on power plant project. His career track record included working on the development projects in different countries, winning and completing government contracts. The power plant he was working on was supposed to generate the green energy and definitely would bring high return on investment. Everything was going fine, but a hole in the budget appeared and Andrejs needed to collect additional 3-4 million in investments to complete the project. He approached his circle of friends, former colleagues and other contacts in his network. The potential investors saw how promising the project was and everyone was prepared to contribute Eur 1-1.5 million. This is a normal business practice to pull the investments together, but what was a disappointment when all these potential investors wanted to be exclusive and backed out when learnt others would be involved. The human factor played a role and Andrejs has lost the project when time ran out. Andrejs not only didn’t lose motivation when he lost the project, but as a seasoned entrepreneur saw an opportunity in this fiasco.

When Andrejs looked at this situation soberly, he thought- “how many promising projects fail, when required sum is not collected?” That’s how an idea of Grupeer was born. Grupeer is a fintech P2P platform where investors can fund a project that satisfies their investment criteria and pull investments together from as little as Eur 10 without even seeing each other. Sure, there are already several platforms existing in the market, but Andrejs saw a niche and despite the fact that he didn’t have any IT background, he had a clear vision how the product should look like in the end and what features to offer. In other words, Andrejs is a strategist and is capable of seeing the big picture, the rest he decided to leave to professionals. He has built a team of talented IT people describing what the end product should look like, so they decided to build a brand-new platform and not to copy any existing solution in the market. The end result was much better than expected as the software was akin to high-security banking core systems. Andrejs’ sister Alla Kisika, who have spent several years working in the UK as an executive project manager in construction business, decided to participate in family venture. Besides that, they recruited professionals with impressive career track record, such as Grupeer’s COO Vladislavs Filimonovs, who previously worked in senior positions in PayPal and Mastercard. After around a year of hard work, Grupeer was officially launched in February 2017.

Welcome to safe environment

So, how does it work? All loans offered on Grupeer’s platform are issued by business professionals, and when а client invests any amount (starting with Eur 10) into particular loan, the claim right on this loan payments transfers to the investor via cession agreement. Unlike other platforms, Grupeer offers multiple products on its platform- credit deals, development projects and soon the new product will be launched. If the payment for the loan is late for 60 days, then the buyback is triggered when the loan originator is obliged to BuyBack the loan and pay out all accrued, but not paid interest. For additional peace of mind some loans are secured by collateral.

The Grupeer did not only design and operate the platform, but also created a “safe environment” for investors, who can relax when invest their own money and be sure that Grupeer “did the homework for them”. Grupeer does its own strict due diligence of every project and partner that approaches the platform for funding. It includes auditing the financial statements, and checking, if the projects are actually taking place in the real life and making sure the loan originator is capable of satisfying BuyBack guarantee. Due to such strict procedures approximately 80% of the projects are dismissed and never offered to clients. Additionally, Grupeer has a strict AML (anti money laundering) procedures in place.