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Fellow Finance - Obstacles to overcome

Fellow Finance is a highly scalable international marketplace lending platform. Recent challenges due to increased competition, adverse regulatory decisions and the Coronavirus pandemic caused a setback to the company’s solid growth and profitability track and is now on a slightly challenging turnaround undertaking.

Good track record, challenging year behind...
Fellow Finance is an international marketplace lending platform connecting investors and lenders and facilitates both consumer and business lending. Operations have in the past years been expanded abroad, with operations now in six countries. The company has been able to achieve a good track record on growth and profitability but has since the latter half of 2019 been met with challenges due to regulation, increased competition and volume declines due to the Coronavirus pandemic. As a result of a decline in facilitated loan volumes sales have decreased and profitability has suffered.

... but long-term potential remains
The business environment still remains challenging in the near-term, especially with the temporary cap on interest rates on certain consumer credit. Potential for disruptive growth in the addressable market and the scalability of the platform still continues to offer ample opportunities in the long-term but with the challenges being faced there is still work to be done. With the improving investor demand after a dip in volumes due to the pandemic we expect the negative sales trend to be reversed and profitability to improve as a result in 2021.

HOLD with a target price of EUR 2.8 (2.5)
We base our valuation on peer multiples and derive a fair value of EUR 2.78 using a 2021 P/sales multiple of 1.3x, at a discount to the consumer finance companies given differences and faced challenges and above the somewhat chronically underperforming lending platform peers. We adjust our target price to EUR 2.8 (2.5) and retain our HOLD-rating.

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