Dear community,
This might be the most original setting I’ve written to you from: the urgency room of a hospital on a Saturday afternoon. It’s nothing serious, just a small injury in two of my right-hand fingers that is keeping me away from the padel court (and proper typing!) and driving me crazy. As usual, the writing kept going in my place and then on an airplane (where else?).
As you know, I enjoy sharing some of my daily life insights with you — maybe they’ll spark other insights in you or make you write back to me. Even if none of that happens, sharing them helps me consolidate their learnings.
Hiring was one of the highlights of the first quarter of this year, with many new faces joining our team and a few onboardings going on as I write. One of the past quarter’s insights actually came from someone I interviewed but we didn’t hire (not because it wasn’t a good candidate but due to the lack of fit with the position). In the final interview of that hiring process I asked the candidate: “How would you describe your relationship with money?”.
This is the answer I got:
“Money? I like it as long as I’m proud of the way I made it”.
This is what Goparity is about. I hope we’ll be onboarding that person to the team one day.
Last quarter’s highlights 🚀
The first quarter of 2024 was again our best quarter ever in investment volume.
Here are some of its highlights:
- We’re finally licensed to operate across the whole European Union
- Together we invested 3.04M€
- Launched a new loan simulation tool for prospective project Promoters
- Funded a project outside the EU directly for the first time, in Canada
- Welcomed Rita Rodrigues as our new Head of Operations, Artem and Vasco as web developers, and Mariana Alves as a marketing and sales intern.
- The new “My Portfolio” area to track the progression of your investment has also been made publicly available.
- We delivered our donation of almost 300€ to MSF (Doctors Without Borders), 1€ per giftcard sold during December.
Our ongoing loans, including arrears 📊
As usual, I want to update you on the projects struggling with their payment plans or keeping the company running.
- Our current rate of Non-Performing Loans (NPL) > 90 days is at 6,8%, whereas NPL < 90 days is at 2,41%.
- During the past quarter (Q1 2024) we were able to regularize 11 loans in arrears and concluded 7 debt restructurings. We also prevented more than 8 projects from entering into arrears with early warnings.
We will continue to work hard to increase the performance of our loans and our reporting on them.
What to expect during the next (this) quarter? 🔜
We’re more than halfway through the current quarter, so I might share some things that happened during Q2 2024 already.
- We funded our first project in Spain (Kleta) since the new license and raised 150.000€ in less than 15 days for sustainable mobility 🚲;
- We funded our biggest campaign ever (also in Spain) for solar power in Murcia — launched with a minimum goal of 600k€, it achieved its stretch goal of 800k€;
- You’ll be able to buy Goparity merchandising soon. If you have seen our t-shirts and socks, you might have noticed they’re not so much about our brand, as they are about our “why”;
- We’ll be revamping our investment strategies experience (reach out to Inês if you want to provide feedback);
- Premium accounts and features will finally start to take shape.
We funded our first project directly with a Colombian promoter.
A 336k€ loan, with a 10-year term, funded in 17h!
A huge success and a game changer because, whether we like it or not, sustainability requires long-term thinking. And our community responded massively. The other good part? There’s more of this to come ☀️🌱
Back to fundraising 🚀
One of the biggest struggles I find in being an impact startup founder is striking the balance between growth and sufficiency (I’ve talked about it before). While we need to acknowledge that we live in a world with limited resources and that money, after a certain point, is no guarantee of happiness or well-being, the challenge ahead of us, as a society, is huge.
I find peace in knowing that Goparity’s growth means more impact, more money flowing to the sustainable side of economy (thus divested from harmful sectors), better resource management and more people positively impacted.
That’s why, after very long and careful thinking, we decided to launch a new funding round to:
- Deploy our international growth strategy
- Add new types of investment to our services (more on this below)
- Grow our investment community, in geographies but also type of investor (e.g. institucional)
While the main details of the round are yet to be defined, one thing is certain: like we did last time we’ll give all our community the opportunity to become our shareholders 🧑🤝🧑.
If you want to stay informed and/or pre-register, please sign up here.
➕ New investment type: adding ETF investment
We love your feedback and take it seriously. If you remember, on my last email, I shared the results of the “most wanted features” enquire. It did mix-up our development roadmap a bit, but hey, it is our community we’re building for.
While we keep working on the guarantee scheme (and might very soon have some news to present, especially for projects in Africa) — we have gone “full steam” (I need to find an “eco” version of this, pun intended) on ETFs — here’s why 👇
- Medium to long-term investment option with high liquidity;
- Attractive returns and good recent performance;
- Flexible and combinable investment strategies that vary in risk, ambition or sector;
In sum, ETF portfolios will allow you to further divest from harmful uses of your money while building an even more diversified portfolio with Goparity.
Unfortunately, services like these cannot be offered for free as they require implementation and running costs.
We kept our fees to the minimum and decided to go as transparent as possible: a fee on Assets Under Management (AUM), or, in other words, a fee on the money you have invested in ETF strategies via Goparity.
- Up to 2.000€ invested in ETFs = 2€ per month
- From 2.000€ to 5.000€ invested in ETFs = 0,8% of AUM per year (billed monthly)
- From 5.000€ onwards = 0,7% of AUM per year (billed monthly)
We won’t take any commissions on profits, transactions, top-ups, withdrawals or spreads. Just one simple and transparent management fee.
The question we’re asking today is:
Considering the pricing above, and knowing we’ll offer 4 to 5 different properly filtered ETF portfolios, with compositions that adapt to the main investment profiles (return vs risk), how much do you think you’d dedicate to it?
To reply, head to this email to select one of the six answers available. Whatever your choice is, please share any feedback you may have.
Profit or impact: your replies ⚖️
The last question I sent you was about where you’d place yourself as an investor, in a spectrum that went from 1) only care about profit, to 10) I only care about impact. This is how it turned out.
As much as investors and journalists would like it, there is no simple answer to: “what motivates your investors the most?” As I always tell them, we have a diverse community, open to all, and it is this combination of profit and impact that makes us unique.
