Aegon : expands investment in Germany’s leading consumer loan platform

Germany's leading online peer-to-peer loan marketplace, auxmoney, has entered a partnership with Aegon Bank. Its platform provides a unique solution to connect and facilitate retail-focused loans directly between borrowers and lenders.

The partnership between auxmoney and Aegon Bank grew out of Aegon's December 2014 venture investment in the company. Known worldwide as Transamerica Ventures, Aegon's venture activities are focused on facilitating partnerships between young innovative startups, and Aegon and its subsidiaries. Investments are focused on new fintech products, enhanced digital marketing solutions and analytics.

In addition to the equity stake Transamerica Ventures owns in the company, Aegon Bank has committed to provide €150 million funding for loans on the auxmoney platform. The funds are being deployed on their website, auxmoney.com, to fund consumer loans approved by auxmoney's sophisticated proprietary scoring and underwriting system.

In the current ultra-low interest rate environment, crowdlending marketplaces are becoming increasingly popular with an ever-wider audience of investors. Private investors in Germany were the first to discover peer-to-peer loans on auxmoney as an attractive asset class. European family offices followed in 2014. Aegon's funding as a large-scale institutional investor now makes auxmoney Europe's most complete marketplace for consumer loans.

Mike de Boer, CFO of Aegon Bank NV, said: 'Our investment on auxmoney's lending platform is a strategic move during times when of consistently low interest rates. As an innovator in banking services we at Aegon Bank highly appreciate auxmoney's remarkable technology and its impressive seven-year track record. They have convinced us to invest on this sophisticated credit marketplace and to establish auxmoney as a new pillar in our investment portfolio.'

'Our decision to invest was proceeded by a comprehensive due diligence and a multi-month live-test phase, during which we analyzed not only the performance of past loans originated by auxmoney but also conducted an in-depth review of the company's lending processes. In this phase we invested €50m and the results are exceeding our expectations.'

Raffael Johnen, Co-founder and CEO said: 'Our service helps people realize their dreams without having to rely on banks. The entry of large-scale investors like Aegon, is an important milestone in our mission to offer people a superior way to borrow money at attractive rates through a vital marketplace. The compelling loan performance of our platform and the growth of our marketplace put us in a unique position to service a sizeable and underserviced segment of Germany society.'

About auxmoney

auxmoney is by far Germany's largest credit marketplace. More than 50,000 investors have funded 60,000 loan requests with a total volume of more than €350 million. On auxmoney.com, private savers and institutional investors directly invest in approved borrowers of different score classes. Avoiding the bank as intermediary, auxmoney can make more favorable loans available to more people, while enabling investors to benefit from attractive risk-adjusted returns. auxmoney's share of the German crowdfunding market is well in excess of 70 percent.