Jakarta. Jakarta-based fintech company Lunaria Annua Teknologi, commonly known by its peer-to-peer lending platform KoinWorks, is confident of meeting its target of turning profitable this year after managing to maintain a healthy loan growth and successful restructuring most of its bad loans. 

The company has helped disburse Rp 2.5 trillion in loans to more than 30,000 small- and medium-scaled businesses in the first nine months this year. "That was about a 50 percent increase from the same period last year," Frecy Ferry Daswaty, KoinWorks's vice president for marketing, told the Jakarta Globe on Friday. 

The result meant KoinWorks was just 17 percent off its revised target this year. Frecy said the Covid-19 pandemic, the company revised down its loan disbursement target to Rp 3 trillion from Rp 5 trillion.

Still, KoinWorks fared much better than conventional banks, which only saw 3 percent loan growth in the January to September period, compared to the same period last year. 

In February, KoinWorks said it targeted to turn a profit in 2020 — for the first time since the company began operating in 2016 — as its projected loan would triple on its platform. The Covid-19 pandemic and government travel and social restrictions imposed to curb it has suppressed consumers' demand across Indonesia. In turn, the appetite for loans also suffered. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic is an unexpected situation that suddenly comes to our lives and forces us to adapt," Benedicto Haryono, KoinWorks's co-founder and chief executive officer, said in a statement on Thursday. 

The pandemic forced the company to delay some of its plans but also make strategic adjustments in "maintaining business performance to become a stronger company after the pandemic ended," Benedicto said. 

KoinWorks also restructured about 10 percent of its total loan portfolio under its Covid-19 pandemic restructuring program. Seven in ten of the restructured loans managed to give a positive return again, the company said. 

The pandemic also bumped up the non-performing loan rate (NPL) at KoinWorks to between 1 percent and 1.14 percent of its total outstanding loan this year from below 1 percent last year.  The 90-day payback success rate (TKB90), which measures how many borrowers pay within a 90-day period since their loan is due, now stood at 97 percent. 

In comparison, average NPL among local banks stood at 3.15 percent at the end of September, data from the Financial Services Authority (OJK) showed. The average TKB90 among peer-to-peer lending companies stood at 91.7 percent, the data showed. 

KoinWorks also took confidence in the rapid growth of its new gold trading service KoinGold and retail bond trading KoinBond. The number of users signed up for the gold trading service jumped 178 percent, and gold transactions rose by 300 percent since the company launched the KoinGold service in July.

Since KoinBond introduction in August, the platform has been involved in two retail bonds offering from the government. KoinWorks users started showing interest in the government bond and make Rp 8 million to 10 million purchases on average, the company said. 

"With these various steps, towards the end of 2020, KoinWorks is optimistic that we can slowly but surely approach the business profitability target," Benedicto said.