As the year 2020 is coming to its closure, we can all take some time to relax, reset and enjoy the wonderful Christmas holidays with friends and family and later on celebrate the New Year.
For the ninth time we would like to take a moment, look back and express gratitude to each and every one of you, for your continues support. We would also like to reflect on our operation in the past 12 months.
The year 2020 was significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and posed a major challenge for the world. At Žltý melón, we have approached this challenge with the utmost responsibility and we have immediately implemented measures to limit its negative effects on our operations, risk rules for approving new loans and the entire existing portfolio. Thanks to these measures the quality and profitability of the Žltý melón portfolio has remained very healthy.
As a part of the measures, we have also introduced a new product - The Needed Loan. It is intended for people with an AA - C ratings whose income have been temporarily reduced or their family expenses have increased as a result of the market situation. In addition to our own products, we have also successfully advanced in our cooperation and extended the partner loans. In the fall, we introduced a new functionality, Investment loan. With this feature investors can easy refinance loans in which they have an active investment. In a new auction, they can invest using the resources tied up in the original loan, and not their available resources. We will use this functionality especially for refinancing larger CashFree Hypo loans.
We are very pleased that, despite the difficult conditions, we recovered quickly from a short-term decline in the volume of monthly loans due to the pandemic, and after the summer we set new records and exceeded the threshold of 500 ths. EUR per month of financed loans. Overall, 2020 will significantly surpass all previous years. The volume of provided loans per year will reach almost 5 mil. EUR, which presents an increase of more than 50 % compared to the previous year.
In 2020 we also continued to optimize and increase the efficiency of our operations. We achieved a positive operating cash flow already in the previous year and we managed to maintain this trend throughout whole 2020, despite the difficult conditions. The company's healthy finances, a wide range of suitable loan products for borrowers and above-standard return on our clients' investment portfolios remain our main goals.
In the future we will not slow down, and we are already preparing more innovations, new products and improvements. We believe that after the successful year 2020, our 2021 will be even better.
Thank you once again and we wish you all the best during the holiday season and in the coming New Year 2021!
Roman Feranec and Žltý melón team