European crowdlending platforms:evaluating risks and comparing platforms from investors’ perspective

Abstract. Lending-based crowdfunding has been growing rapidly during the last decade offering a new asset class for investors to invest in. A number of intermediaries connecting potential borrowers and lenders with each other, called crowdlending platforms, have been founded across Europe. Investors have plenty of options to invest in different kind of high-yielding loans, for instance consumer loans and business loans, through lending platforms. Platform selection is crucial for investors but unfortunately, the literature regarding lending platforms is scarce. Therefore, this seminal study focuses on introducing, discussing and evaluating the key risks related to crowdlending and comparing crowdlending platforms from investors’ perspective. The study answers to the question how to evaluate and mitigate the risks that investors are facing when investing through lending platforms. Further, the study provides a wide overview of European crowdlending market and platform practices. The empirical part of the study is mostly qualitative and comprises of two different datasets: (i) questionnaire responses from 19 European crowdlending platforms and (ii) hand-collected data from public sources including 108 European lending platforms. Findings of the study show that the crowdlending market is diverse including various business models, loans and practices. The platforms can control and mitigate most of the risks by high-class risk policies and by good-quality practices, which makes platform selection the most crucial decision for investors to make when investing in this relatively new asset class. Remarkable is that the lack of platform transparency and the weak availability of data complicates investors’ evaluation process and makes platform-level comparison challenging. Therefore, I suggest that investors perform a holistic due diligence for platforms before investing, and this study give a useful framework for investors to pay attention to relevant factors when evaluating risks and comparing platforms with each other

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/‘proxy’ AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele