How we look after your money.
Lending always carries risk. What we can do is reduce it, measure it and tell you about it without dressing it up.
01
First things first: we don't cover the losses
Finnoba does not commit its own capital to cover defaults, and guarantees neither your capital nor your return. Credit risk sits with the lender — and that is why the return is what it is. Everything below lowers the odds of something going wrong; none of those defences hands your money back if it goes wrong anyway.
02
The general idea
We're not going to tell you this is risk-free, because it isn't. What we do is attack it from five sides: lend in the same currency the business gets paid in, check who we lend to, start with small amounts, force your money to spread across several loans, and stop fraud before the money goes out.
03
The five defences
- 1
Same currency (our golden rule)
We only lend dollars to businesses that already get paid in dollars: coffee, cacao, blueberry, avocado, fishing, export textiles and software with clients abroad. That way debt and income are in the same currency: if the dollar rises, the instalment is still payable. A business invoicing in soles doesn't qualify, however well it's doing.
- 2
We check before lending
We verify the business exists and is in good standing with the tax authority, that it has recent sales, that a foreign client pays it in dollars, and what it needs the money for. We expect to turn down more applications than we approve.
- 3
We start small
Any business's first loan is $500 over a few months. The amount only grows once they've shown they repay. Nobody walks in asking for $15,000.
- 4
We spread your money whether you like it or not
A $500 loan is assembled by several people, so each slot costs $100. It isn't optional: the engine won't let a single loan take more than 10% of what you deposited, even if you want it to. Assignment is automatic and in order of arrival, and every slot in a loan is repaid — and takes losses — in the same proportion.
- 5
We stop fraud before any money goes out
We validate the tax ID with SUNAT, require 24 months of formal trading, match the legal representative against their national ID, verify documents with a liveness check and — the strongest control of all — only disburse to a bank account held under that same tax ID. Before money moves there's also a credit bureau check, electronic invoicing verification, device fingerprinting, a 24-hour cooling-off window and a verification call.
04
What happens when someone doesn't pay
It's the first thing everybody asks, so it's written down rather than saved for a call:
- There are grace days agreed in the contract. Within that window there's no penalty, only reminders.
- After the grace days collections begin: direct contact, a payment plan where the business is still viable, and escalation where it isn't.
- Arrears accrue late interest on top of the ordinary interest, capped at 15% of the maximum rate set by the central bank. We don't invent charges above that.
- The ladder freezes while anything is in arrears. Nobody moves up a level owing an instalment, however good their record was before.
- Late payment is reported to credit bureaus and can lead to legal action, as agreed in the individual contract.
- Whatever is recovered is shared pari passu among everyone who put money into that loan, in the same proportion they would have been paid.
05
What we're aiming for
| Indicator | Target | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| Loans that don't get repaid | Under 5% | No data |
| Applications we approve | 15-25% | No data |
| Money recovered after a late payment | 25% or more | No data |
| Loan terms | 2 to 6 months | No data |
We haven't lent any money yet, so there's nothing real to report. These are the numbers we're aiming for. The actual ones will appear in this same table from the first cycle, updated every month.
06
What we do NOT control
Some things are beyond us, and we'd rather say so up front:
- An economic crisis that leaves many people unable to pay at once
- A drop in the international price of a product, or a market closing, leaving a business unpaid
- Rule changes that force us to operate differently
- Someone deceiving us and us not catching it during the checks
- Us getting it wrong: we're new and have no history yet to prove otherwise
We can reduce the risk of our own operation, not the world's. That's why nobody should put money into Finnoba they can't afford to lose entirely.