Lucerne University in Switzerland is out with their annual report on crowdfunding in the country. This is the third year in a row that the report has been published. The “Crowdfunding Monitoring Switzerland 2016 tracks the growth and trends in this sector of finance.
In the introduction, Prof. Dr. Andreas Dietrich, states;
In previous years, we have usually commented that the market had grown rapidly, but the absolute volumes of funding remained at a low level. This year, though, the market has grown markedly in percentage as well as in absolute terms. For the first time, crowdfunding has been instrumental in raising substantially more than CHF 100 million. This compares to just under CHF 28 million in the previous year. The structure of the market has also changed greatly: as expected, real estate crowdinvesting and the financing of SMEs via crowdfunding (business crowdlending) have made considerable contributions to this growth.
The platforms in these two segments witnessed markedly higher transaction volumes. On the investor side, this has increasingly sparked the interest of professional investors capable of supplying the requisite volumes. Given these fundamental changes in 2016, we are expecting 2017 to again witness a substantial acceleration in growth.
As of April 2016 there were 50 crowdfunding platforms in operation in Switzerland. This was an increase by 10 versus year prior.
New entrants to the crowdfunding market in 2016 were; creditworld, Funders, Hyposcout, Hypotheko, ideenkicker.ch, Lend, Lendico, letshelp.ch, Swisslending and swisspeers. During Q1 2017, several real estate platforms entered the sector; Crowdli and Foxstone, and crowdlending platforms Crowd4Cash and Lendora. Swiss Starter and Masspurse exited the market in 2016.
The highlights of the report include:
- Total sector activity included CHF 128.2 million and increase of +362% for 3,098 campaigns in Switzerland
- “Crowdlending” grew by +597%, to CHF 55.1 million
- “Crowdinvesting” increased by 453%, to CHF 39.2 million
- Reward-based crowdfunding and donations grew by 37%, to CHF 17.0 million
- Invoice trading registered CHF 17 million for the year
- During the past sevent years, total crowdfunding in Switzerland has raised CHF 193.8 million
- Over 100,000 individuals participated in crowdfunding during 2016
- Out of 2,042 campaigns, 1,338 were successful or 65.5% success rate
The growth of investment based crowdfunding and the slowdown of perk-based or reward based crowdfunding is a phenomenon that will be reflected in other regions. The Swiss online lending market has experienced the strongest year-on-year growth of all categories. The funds raised rose by almost 600% from CHF 7.9 million to CHF 55.1 million, while the number of successfully acquired loans increased from 266 to 840.
This is a good report. You may download it for free after handing over your email address here.
The authors describe the Swiss crowdfunding market as middle of the field on an international comparison basis. But the diversity and depth of business models have increased markedly over the past almost two years. The crowdfunding market in Switzerland appears to be poised for more rapid development.