By Heinz-Roger Dohms
While the listed Frankfurt SME credit platform Creditshelf reports fresh figures every few weeks, the presumably most important competitor among the fintechs (namely Compeon) likes to pretend to be clandestine. This week, however, the people of Düsseldorf knocked one out: “Compeon cracks 1.5 billion euro mark” !!! (What was meant was the brokered loan volume since the company was founded up to and including Q1 2021).
Now, of course, such an aggregated “all time” number raises more questions than it answers. Especially since Compeon does not name a specific value for 2019 or 2020 in the statement. However, if you go into the archive and put all the numbers on top of each other that have ever been made public at Compeon, then after a little back and forth the following data series results:
- Up to and including 2016, Compeon brokered an estimated 50-75 million euros;
- In 2017 it was presumably 125-150 million euros
- In 2018, roughly estimated 275-350 million euros followed
- In 2019 it was around 450 million euros; and in 2020 (Corona-kink!) finally around 400 million euros.
- Plus: assumed maybe 150 million euros in Q1 2021.
- For the whole year? According to the announcement, if Compeon is aiming for a volume of EUR 750 million …
That all sounds much more impressive than with Creditshelf, where it was exactly 37.6 million euros in the first quarter. Multiplied by four to five, that would result in a total of around 170 million euros for the year as a whole. What should be considered here, however: With Creditshelf (for reasons that we will examine in more detail another time), 1 euro “arranged” credit volume of between 4.5 cents and 5.0 cents is stuck; at Compeon it should be 1.5 cents to 2.0 cents. In other words: Compeon’s supposedly full lead is not that full. It has not yet been decided who of the two SME loan fintechs has the greater potential in the long term.
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