As an owner of a successful business, you will sooner or later amass a good amount of retained earnings in your business.

Retained earnings are what remains of the net profit after all dividends to shareholders have been issued. These retained earnings are usually kept in the business to re-invest into new products or expansion. However, even after those are taken care of, there might still be considerable funds sitting idle in bank accounts, and that’s almost never good, as inflation will eat away at the real value of those funds.

The key to maintaining the real value of those retained earnings, is, of course, to find stable low-risk investments with high liquidity.

Here are my top places to invest retained earnings:

Nexo – This is a platform where you can lend money to borrowers who put up their crypto as collateral, while you earn a yearly return of 8%. You can withdraw the money at any time, giving you full liquidity.

Iban Wallet – A platform that can earn you between 2.5% and 6% interest depending on the amount invested and the time period you lock up your funds for. Much better than a savings account.

If you are ready to take higher risks, you could invest some of your company’s retained earnings into pure P2P lending platforms. I would suggest using systems like Mintos’ Invest & Acess or Bondora’s Go and Grow to maintain a high degree of liquidity.

Real estate investments can also provide relatively safe places to park a company’s money, however they can be more illiquid, especially if the platforms don’t have a great secondary market.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any other ideas on investing company retained earnings?

Mintos is my favorite P2P lending platform, and I’ve been a happy investor for 4 years now. I’ve also been bumped up to VIP investor status due to having invested a significant amount of money with them.

As I mentioned in my Mintos review, being a VIP investor brings with it some perks, and one of these is a direct point of contact at Mintos. Over the Christmas period, I received a package from Mintos with a sweatshirt and baseball cap, which they sent as a thank you gesture for investing with them over these years. I really liked the gesture and the gift, so I asked them if we could give away a few of these to my audience. Luckily, the guys over at Mintos were happy to collaborate.

So starting today and for the next month, if you invest with Mintos through any of the links in this post, you will be eligible to win a Mintos sweatshirt and cap. 

Here are the full conditions for the raffle:

• To be eligible to win, you must create an investor account at Mintos, pass the verification and start investing (no minimum required).
• Once you sign up and invest, you need to fill in the form below using the same email address as the one you used for signing up at Mintos. The Mintos guys will then verify that the given email is registered and invested.
• Make sure you sign up through this link or any of the other links in this post to be eligible.

On the 15th of February the contest will end and I will send Mintos a list of all the emails collected so that they can verify that the requirements have been met. They will then send me a list of randomly chosen winners and I will personally send over the gifts to the 5 winners.

Note that for this contest, I will only be able to send winners to investors with residency in the European Union.

If you’re not very familiar with Mintos, make sure to read my comprehensive review of Mintos and also the separate review of their Invest & Access product. Mintos is definitely my favorite P2P lending platform, and it is the biggest one operating in Europe, with more than 230,000 active investors and more than 4.3bn euro in accumulated investments. The historical interest rate is slightly above 11.5% per year, which is better than any other investment product I know of.

Good luck to all and hope you have a great year of investing!

Register at Mintos

Estonian P2P lending platform Kuetzal has ceased operations this week. This is one of the lending platforms that I had warned investors not to invest in, due to many of the projects looking like outright scams.

I hadn’t invested in this platform myself due to that reason, and I hope this serves as a warning sign of the fact that P2P lending is risky business and while there are good profits to be made as investors, we need to be very careful with conducting due diligence on the platforms that we invest in and make sure we only invest in the best ones.

The platform was run by some of the youngest people in P2P lending, which is a concern I highlighted in my review of Fast Invest. It’s hard for people in their early or mid-twenties to really have the necessary maturity and experience to lead a complex financial platform.

All investors received the following email:

Dear Kuetzal investor,

Our team wants to apologize for delays in payments and replies to e-mails received.
Unfortunately we have to inform that Kuetzal is announcing wind-down, furthermore the company will only process withdrawals of the funds, the company is no longer accepting new project applications, investors registrations and deposits. Company’s reputation was harmed sufficiently for the past weeks, and Kuetzal management does not see a way to recover investor’s activity, therefore we may not return to usual working process. The mission of the company may not be reached anymore.

Due to high number of reports, claims and negative messages SEB Bank and PAPAYA (the only two banks that Kuetzal used) initiated the AML check and has temporarily blocked Kuetzal’s bank accounts. Kuetzal is currently unable to perform any operations for undefined period. Kuetzal management is aiming to reestablish the activity of both operational bank accounts and perform buy-backs and withdrawals in shortest terms respectively.

Kuetzal will keep the investors informed.

We have not been able to make Kuetzal a successful player on crowdfunding market. We will however aim to exit the market quietly with minimum repercussion to our customers and the whole crowdfunding market. The website functions furthermore will be limited, only the user area will be kept. All the user area functions will continue working as before.
In case of technical issues with withdrawals or other question we kindly ask to use our contact mail instead of social networks or cellphone to receive the fastest service.

Kuetzal’s e-mail:
[email protected]

Were you invested in Kuetzal? Did you see it coming?

If you feel scammed by the Kuetzal situation, you can join the Kuetzal action group on Facebook, which aims to get some recourse for burned investors.

NEO Finance started out in 2015, and is managed by a team of Lithuanian and Dutch individuals and issues consumer loans to Lithuanians.

Lithuania is one of the European countries with the best profitability / risk binomial in this regard – in a model similar to that of other consolidated platforms such as Bondora in Estonia, but with one caveat: it offers for its loans the possibility of contracting a Guarantee Fund that would cover possible loan defaults.

NEO Finance is a fintech startup, which manages and administers one of the leading P2P (peer-to-peer) lending and investing platforms in Lithuania, named Paskolu klubas (Lithuanian for Loan Club). NEO Finance offers consumer loans, and is an intermediary between the borrowers who are in the need of loans up to 15.000 EUR, and the lenders (investors), who are willing to earn additional money. This enables us to offer lower annual interest rates (starting from 6%) for the borrowers, as well as higher annual returns for the lenders (12.00% on average).

NEO Finance holds an Electronic money institution (EMI) licence which allows operations in entire European Union. The licence has been issued by the Financial supervisor authority (FSA) of Lithuania, i.e. the Bank of Lithuania, and allows operations in P2P and consumer credit markets. NEO Finance is under the supervision of the Bank of Lithuania, which means that the company is obliged to perform external audit at least once a year, and constantly present to the Bank of Lithuania mandatory reports.

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There are three sources that I refer to when it comes to market data for P2P lending platforms and the P2P market in general:

• Statista
• Brismo
• P2P Market Data
• P2P Banking

You can usually also find information on each p2p lending platform’s website. If they don’t publicly display this kind of data, I would be inclined to trust them significantly less than if they did.

It’s very important to keep tabs on such data to understand what volumes each platform is generating and whether they are profitable or not.

P2P lending is growing at an incredible rate in Europe and around the world. According to a Mintos statement, the world’s P2P lending market was 26.16 billion USD in 2015, but growth is projected to reach 897.85 billion USD by 2024. If this vision were to come true, the annual growth would be 48.2% in 2016-24, which is nothing short of spectacular.