A challenging quarter with several highlights🎢 (Q1 2023)
Dear community,
It’s a little after 8 a.m., and I’m writing from a beautiful small bakery in the center of Sant Cugat del Vallès, close to where I live.
Again, I’m not listening to any music. Not because I’m afraid to lose focus but because I decided to let the sounds of morning activities soak in: the ovens opening, the expresso machine, the waiters chatting, a few couples and friends having breakfast and those ordering to go. My first meeting of the day will start soon, and it will be here, face-to-face.
A challenging first quarter💪
I won’t lie to you — the first three months of 2023 were as intense as they were exciting.
Following up on an amazing final quarter of 2022 and the successful closure of our funding round, during the first three months of the year, we have been focused on improving our internal processes and our communication — both within the team and with our community.
We onboarded new people, and we are still hiring (you can check our current open roles here). Also, we have given maximum attention to the ongoing loans in our portfolio while the macroeconomic context sent out reasons to be careful.
Looking at some numbers
🥳 January was our best month ever, with more than 1M€ invested.
📈 We achieved our highest turnover in a quarter.
🙌 We observed our highest growth in users and investors ever in a quarter, with around 40 people completing their registration every day.
☀️ We funded more solar energy than ever with new installers, energy communities and solar power in non-profit organisations.
🌱 We funded 25 projects that contribute to 12 Sustainable Development Goals, with the biggest impact on SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production),
👷 Generating 38 jobs
🧑🤝🧑 Positively impacting 5154 people
🐟 Guaranteeing the sustainable management of 3,5 hectares of land and water.
🌳 Avoiding 597 tons of CO2 yearly.
On the lower end, Q1 2023 is the first quarter ever (since we started Goparity) where we didn’t have more investment through the platform than in the previous one.
But, April is off to a good start with almost 500k€ in only two weeks and plenty of investments to launch.
We held one #GoparityMeetUp per month
- (Jan) How do I start investing? — held in Portuguese
- (Feb) IRS (tax declarations) — held in Portuguese
- (Mar) Risk and Loans in arrears — held in English
This month, our MeetUp will be about “Investing with impact”, and will be conducted in English. You can register here to receive invites to all future MeetUps. Learn more about our MeetUps here.
Our loans’ performance and how we’re acting on it 📊
Despite all the achievements and the exciting prospects, it feels like the performance of our portfolio is the main topic I should address, transparently as we always strive to.
Earlier this year, we started to get the first signals that the macroeconomic indicators reflected some changes in the real economy.
As you might have noticed, we have a very low Non-Performing Loan (NPL) rate but recently observed a few more projects with delayed payments.
We started the year with a >90-day NPL * of 1,3% and finished the quarter at 1,6% (the banking average is around 3%, and our sector’s is well above 5%).
* > 90-day NPL: loans in arrears for over 90 days.
What have we done so far
We created an internal task force composed of all the founders, the executive committee members and people in the operations team. The goal was to be as fast as possible in getting more tangible information to provide to the investors and either recover the debt or establish a plan for it. As a result:
- Between February and March, we sent out 21 emails with project updates.
- We proactively contacted Promoters with low account balance.
- We started restructuring debt for some of the ongoing loans with payments in arrears for a longer time.
How to invest in times like these 🧐
In October 2022, I wrote to you about investing in times of uncertainty and also published an article about the topic. They mostly referred to a few principles one can use when defining an investment strategy.
The main ones were:
- Diversify to mitigate risk 🧮
- Think long term: better return for you and the planet ☝️
- Reinvest 🔁
- Save, save and compound 🚀
- Keep your investment expenses low (or at zero) 🤏
- Define a % of your wealth to invest 💰
Picking up on this last one I’d like to bring your attention to a study by the Climate Safe Lending Network, TOPO and BankFWD, that recently estimated the carbon footprint of your idle money in a bank account.
As you might know, money in a current account isn’t actually there (at least a big chunk of it isn’t) — it is being invested by your bank in a multitude of manners, projects, or sectors, many of which you might not support. The result: 126kg of CO2 are emitted on average for every US$1000 in a bank account.
We also did our math and concluded that for every US$1000 invested with Goparity, you’re avoiding the emission of 1.428kg of CO2, on average.
This means that investing less than 10% of your available wealth through Goparity will be enough to balance the carbon footprint of all your money in bank accounts 🌍
Adding to this, since we operate under an electronic money institution license, the money on your Goparity account is actually there.
What’s in store for Q2 2023 🔮
📲 Improvements in your user area and project information:
- Project updates on your user area where you can always easily find the latest available information about your investees;
- A new area dedicated exclusively to the financial performance of your investments;
🌍 Projects in new geographies: solar power in Brazil is coming back strong, but we might also add a new location in Africa to our portfolio. And solar power in a micro greens provider to a few Michelin Star restaurants;
🆕 A new “Get funded” section on our website: with a fast track for projects within specific criteria;
🙌 We’ll meet again in person: in June, in Lisbon to celebrate our community and our achievements together and award our boldest companies and entrepreneurs;
🎁 We’ll start to send out the rewards we promised: in our equity crowdfunding campaign to the almost one thousand users that also became shareholders.
The question ❓
As usual, my email comes with a question. But this time, it is not dedicated to everyone, only to women ♀️
As is widely known, on average, fewer women are investing than men. We have been dedicating some attention to this topic and would like to share some numbers:
- More than half of our team members are women.
- 2 of our top 5 investors are women.
- We have 2 women in the 5-member Executive Committee.
- Since the past quarter, there is one woman on our Board of Directors.
- And almost 50% of our website visitors are women,
Yet, by the end of 2022, only 26% of our investors were women (a percentage that has grown from 18% in 2020, nonetheless).
1. Would you feel more comfortable if we made #MeetUps just for women? Reply in the comments with Yes or No.
2. Would you like to develop this topic further? Share with us in the comments, explaining what you think is preventing you, as a woman, from investing with Goparity.
Please feel free to also send out any suggestions you may have, no matter what gender you identify with.
Can you help us gather more gender data?
Democratizing sustainable finance is also about working towards greater gender equality in impact finance. Reliable gender data is fundamental to making informed decisions and understanding their impact.
Please go to your profile settings, choose “Personal Details”, and select the gender you identify with in the field “Gender”.
Finally, I’d just like to point out that we recently revamped our Telegram and WhatsApp.
Inside each of these new communities, you will find two sub-groups:
📣 Open Campaigns
💡 Suggest new topics
Soon, we will launch a new one.
Feel free to join to stay informed!
Nuno Brito Jorge
Founder and CEO
