Social Lending and Its Risks

Abstract

Czech companies discover alternative non-banking financing of their business. Social lending known as peer to peer (P2P) financing has started to appear on the Czech market. P2P lending is a new platform of financial transactions that bypasses traditional intermediaries by directly connecting borrower and lenders. But there is an information asymmetry between lenders and borrowers to which online P2P lending platforms have to face. As many loans are not secured by collateral, the assessment of the borrower's creditworthiness is very important. The aim of this article is to define risks of investments to P2P loans and propose the elimination of these risks. We went through studies focused on default of corporate entities which were done in different countries and selected some of them. We have chosen these studies because their research is focused not only on financial indicators assessment but also on non-financial indicators assessment and use econometric models to measure probability of default. These studies also confirmed well known basic relations which should be taken into consideration by lenders – higher profitability, higher liquidity and higher volume of assets means lower risk of default, while higher indebtedness and higher leverage means higher risk of default.