SAVY Analysis

Savy was founded in 2014 in Vilnius, Lithuania and was recently included on the 2022 gazelle list as one of the fastest growing Lithuanian companies. It serves lithuanian citizens and businesses with consumer loans and fixed interest development financing. To this day, Savy has funded more than €80 million worth of loans by more than 14,000 registered investors and during the past 12 months roughly €1.8 million has been funded every month. The average investor has invested a bit over €6,000 in more than 150 different loans.

• SAVY has been offering loan investments for more than 9 years and the company operating the platform has been profitable for the past 3 years
• Unsecured personal loans and loans secured with real estate ranging from 6% to 40% in 6 to 96 months
• The platform offers a secondary market, automatic investing, charges investors 1%-3% fees on transactions and withholds 15% tax.

Savy operates as an online financing platform with intermediating consumer credit companies acting on their behalf. They issue loans directly on their website to businesses and consumers from Lithuania besides financing loans from intermediatiaries. The list of intermediating consumer credit companies ranges from Zotas, Altero, Finbro, Lendmax among others. Any investor with a paysera account can invest in the loans with as little as €10. Loans marked with a shield is protected by the “investor fund” which compensates investors for 90+ days delayed if there is money available in the fund.

The duration of the loans are between 6 months to 96 months (8 years) with interest rates from 6% to over 40% depending on the default probability. Most loans are unsecured while some are secured by collatoral in form of property. The platform informs about their calculated rate of default probability and show a SAVY credit rating on all loans. The website is currently only available in Lithuanian, while their investment portal is also available in English.

Savy offers investors to sell their loans in a secondary market and enables automatic investing based on pre-set criteria. More than 30% of their active investors have completed at least one transaction in the secondary market with a total of over 240,000 secondary market transactions amounting to €7.2 million.^[1]

Savy advertises a historical average interest rate of 21% and that they invest at least 12% in all of the unsecured personal loans. As of this writing it is not clear when their statistics page was last updated but it shows that out of €73 million loans issued since launch (compared to €82 million reported to P2PMarketData), around €200.000 is delayed 1 to 209 days, while €1.75 million is delayed more than 210 days and €1.6 million has been marked as bad debt and are in legal procedures. There are no further insights into the net return for investors apart from €54.2 million having been returned to investors.

SAVY makes money from fees charged to borrowers and investors. The borrowers are paying fees depending on the loan type while investors are charged 1% on all transactions untill the loan agreement is terminated and 3% on all terminated loans.^[2] Interest earned on loans through SAVY as well as profits made on secondary market trades are subject to 15% tax.^[3]

The Founder and CEO of UAB Bendras Finansavimas which operates SAVY is Audrius Žiugžda. He has been running the company for more than 9 years now and is one of the early pioneers in the baltics in online peer-to-peer lending since the platform facilitated it's first funding in August 2014. Audrius comes from a background in SEB bankas and has had executive experience since 2010. The company employs more than 30 people, among it co-founder and general counsil Vincentas Zabulis, co-founder and board member Vytautas Zabulis as well as head of legal Tomas Pelėdžius.^[4]

The balance of the Investor Fund is similar to known buyback guarantee structures at other platforms but with a dedicated fund in which they provide transparency in the statistics of the balance, the payments to and from the fund. The payments to and from the fund is steadily increasing but in 2023 the funds balance has decreased to below €20,000.^[5]

For Lithuanian citizens SAVY declares the interest received and profits made on secondary markets for each investor every year to VMI and the platform is supervised by the Bank of Lithuania as both a peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding platform with a lithuanian consumer credit license.^[3]

UAB Bendras Finansavimas which is the company behind SAVY has delivered positive net returns as a company for the past three years and increased the annual revenue from €1.78 million in 2020 to €2.83 million in 2022.^[6]