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26/05/2021
Sneakypeer Newsletter Week 21
Welcome back to the Sneakypeer newsletter! Below you will find industry news from last week.
Fagura raises more than €300,000 to become an online bank
Fagura, a peer-to-peer lending platform based in Estonia, has recently raised €312,920 due to participating in a Seedrs fundraising campaign. Fagura’s original target of €200,000 was surpassed by 156 percent, 39 days before the deadline.
As a result of receiving an exceeded amount of funding, the platform plans to utilize the money to acquire a crowdfunding license in Romania and become a digital bank. According to Fagura, the platform will eventually expand to other Southeast European countries as well, which are regions with over 100 million inhabitants, which could potentially generate a profit of 10 to 20 percent in loans. Having tested the platform in a sandbox environment in Moldova, Figura is confident of its entry into the Romanian market.
The FCA takes action against online investment scams
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is actively discussing a law change with social media firms to suppress investment fraud, having noticed a recent rise in investment scams online. The FCA has issued 632 warnings of online investment fraud just this year, more than half of the 1,204 warnings reported in 2020 in total.
According to Mark Steward, the executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, online scams are exceptionally deceptive because fraudsters can target the same groups of people as legitimate advertisers through search engine algorithms. As a way of tackling this issue, the FCA is communicating with social media firms about a change in the law that would make them obligated to abide by section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, which prohibits the engagement of investment activity by persons that the FCA does not approve.
