Ibancar raises credit facility of up to €10m led by Knuru Capital

By Edlyn Cardoza

Ibancar, the asset-based consumer credit platform, has signed its first institutional debt facility up to an amount of €10m. The business is scaling fast in Spain and now plans to expand its activity to Mexico and launch other auto-related credit products.

The facility has been led by global venture capital and private credit investor Knuru Capital. It will allow the platform to fund its growing loan book and continue its explosive growth trajectory. The facility will complement Ibancar’s existing and ongoing debt funding from crowdlending marketplaces, where it has built one of the strongest originator track records offering high returns to investors with exceptionally low credit losses.

During 2021 the platform experienced exceptional 3x year on year revenue growth and 4x loan origination growth whilst keeping impairments below 3% of revenue.

Ibancar, a FinTech business in scale-up mode, is focused on digital car title loans that provide a means for borrowers to obtain loans based on the value of their car. The proprietary platform is 100% digital and remote and can offer cheaper, more extensive, and longer loans than most other online lenders. The platform aims to provide an ethical alternative for millions of borrowers using expensive unsecured online lending products like payday loans. Its use of cars as collateral also brings underbanked, unbanked and credit, invisible borrowers into the online consumer finance market.

Ibancars digital platform has proven highly successful in the Spanish market, where it has issued €7m in loans and has also proven its resilience by continuing to perform and deliver significant growth without credit losses during the COVID crisis.

Alex Melis, founder and CEO of Ibancar, said, “We believe that most products in the online consumer credit market do not solve the borrower’s problem and the only way to solve this problem is by offering longer, larger, cheaper and transparent loans. The only inclusive and ethical way to deliver such loans is by using collateral. We are extremely proud of our success and plan to expand our product offering into car backed credit cards as well as secured B2C and C2C auto finance for marketplaces. We also intend to launch Ibancar in Mexico during 2022.”

The company plans to announce an additional institutional debt facility of up to €50 million in 2022 and is currently working on a €3 million equity raise to fund the development of new products and expansion into new markets.