Colombian market: takeaways about the lending industry and interview with top advertiser
Dear audience, in today’s post we will talk about Colombian market (one of the countries where DoAff.NET has more operations). In this article you will be presented with some data, trends and reasons why as a publisher you should consider promoting offers in this country from Latam. Moreover, if you read until the end, a full interview with our top advertiser Lineru.com will be your reward!
Data
In the last decade, there has been a fast digitalisation process in our societies. This has also been the case in the financial services industry, and now this seems to be accelerating due to Covid-19 lock-downs.
According to research done by the strategic consulting firm Korefusion in summer of 2020, Colombia is the 3rd country in LATAM (Latin America) in fintech development. Currently, 128 companies are framed in that sector. From this 128 companies, 38 of them are categorised into Lending. Most interestingly, the report tells us the funding amounts such companies are receiving from investors. In Colombia, 94.7% of the investments were received by lending companies (only the other 5.3% was received by blockchain, payments or other fintech companies). This high percentage, can be seen as a sign of the business potential of the lending sector in Colombia.
One last interesting conclusion taken by the Korefusion study is that 28 of the lending companies are scoped to keep growing in the upcoming years. You can access their whole report here.
There’s another interesting aspect that a publisher can see as a reason to promote offers in Colombia. In that country, there’s a big percentage of unbanked population in Colombia. From Global Financial Inclusion reports that the World Bank publishes, there’s only a 45% of Colombians who have a product or account with a financial institution. What does this mean? It simply says that many people who will need a banking product may use alternative financial institutions, like online lenders. This is already proved and there can be seen that only non traditional lenders are offering loans to this part of the population.
Players
Which are some of the companies who are working with this underserved population in Colombia? There are local companies offering around 300 USD loans (payday) to the users but there are also international companies with local branch in Colombia.
Some of the players are looking for traffic and you can find their offer in DoAff.NET!
Please talk to your account manager to know more details about the statistics and performance of such offers.
Trends
We’ve get to know some key data and some players from the online lending industry in Colombia, but what can we expect for the future?
According to Lina Orozco, manager of Growth at Zinobe (Lineru.com) “Lineru estimates to surpass the levels of loan issuance that we had before Covid-19 during the upcoming 2021 spring”. In the last part of the article you will be able to read her whole insight in a short interview we made her!
Finally, despite the temporary decrease and pause of the consumer credit volume during first months of Covid-19, the numbers are rising again and they are expected to keep increasing. You can review this trend in this article with data from Superintendence of Finance (Colombian regulator for the fintech sector).
Interview
Hi Lina. First of all, I will appreciate If you can introduce yourself to those who do not know you yet, which will surely work as a reminder about you for those who already cooperate with you.
Tell us a little about yourself, your position and your company in general
- My name is Lina Orozco, and I am the responsible person for Growth at Zinobe (Lineru). This includes the acquisition and retention of clients.
Could you share with us how Covid-19 affected your company, what were your first thoughts, how did the management react? Any particular idea you may feel comfortable sharing.
- At first, we saw Covid-19 as something far from us that won’t reach Colombia. Once it arrived here, there was a big uncertainty feeling especially about how the market will react regarding loan repayment. Due to this factor, we reduced the acquisition of new customers while we redesigned a strategy to understand the changes.
Did the target audience or maybe scoring suffered changes since spring? Maybe something else?
- Our market segment did not change since our Lineru credit product targets a big part of the Colombian population, any person can access and apply because everything is 100% online. However, some temporal adjustments were established on the scoring at the same time that we analyzed and learnt about the repayment behaviour of the users.
What can you say about your customers and country? On which details do you advise our publishers to pay attention?
- The Colombian market increased the usage of digital products during the pandemia and the quarantine period, therefore we see this as a great moment and opportunity for fintech companies like us. To the publisher, what I suggest is that they focus their efforts in taking advantage of this opportunity. We also encourage affiliates to promote our product and get new traffic who has the need of a credit, highlighting the smooth and easy process of applying to a loan in Lineru. A user obtains an immediate answer to his application and receives his funds in 24 hours or less.
Do you have any statistics which will convince our publishers to cooperate with you?
- Lineru estimates to surpass the levels of loan issuance that we had before Covid-19 during the upcoming 2021 spring. This prediction and goal should allow your publishers to identify their target audience and keep increasing the traffic volumes. Additionally, we are the leaders on alternative lending in Colombia. Since we started operations eight years ago, we have disbursed almost 2 million loans.
Some of our clients, from time to time, decide to make some contests or bonuses for our publishers, what is your approach about this? Can we publishers expect something from you?
- At Lineru we have an incentive payout scale that benefits the publishers if they bring us a higher volume of CPAs (issued loans). For special campaigns, with outstanding volumes, we can consider exclusive discounts to use them in your communications.
What is your forecast for the near future in general about the affiliate market? Any thoughts?
- This is an industry having a big opportunity in Colombia. Therefore, we expect it to keep growing and having a proliferation of new specialized affiliates in the upcoming months.
Finally, could you explain to our audience and the publishers what did your government do regarding the first wave of covid-19 on a general point as well as regarding businesses like yours? And what are they planning for the second wave?
- The Colombian government’s main approach was to help the people more affected by the pandemia via state benefits and subsidies. They even came forward to Lineru, and jointly, we designed a special credit product to support the Colombian workers during this uncertain and income reductions period.
Thank you Lina!
