Investing 30k EUR in different P2P Lending platforms

The plan was set in stone in December. To invest 30k 28k EUR in different P2P Lending platforms at the beginning of January.

But let’s rewind to the week of Christmas. I proactively started signing up with the 15 different P2P lending/investing platforms on Monday 23rd of December and continued on Tuesday 24th of December.

Signup and KYC

While going thru the sign-up processes of the different platforms, I’ve seen different levels of sophistication. With some platforms you provide all the details upfront. With some platforms you provide the KYC information after the registration. Some platforms send you email confirmations, some send you SMS.

The platforms using the veriff API usually confirmed my identity within 10 minutes. Negative outliers are Agrikaab and PeerBerry which didn’t have any form of KYC.

And the absolute worst performing platform in terms of KYC so far is Envestio which didn’t verify my account after more than 14 days. I have to assume that they were closed during Christmas and only started working on 6th of January again. My support inquiries were not answered either.

Here’s a list of the different platforms and their confirmation and KYC methods:

Getting the money to Revolut

I got a bank transfer from the US with the money from my sold stocks to my USD Revolut account in the UK on January 3rd at 00:43. 3 minutes later I’ve exchanged 22’346 USD for 20’000 EUR (at a 1:0.895 rate). (Don’t ask why I was still awake, holidays for the win). And another 4’461 USD for 4’000 EUR (at a 1:0.8965 rate) in the morning.

From Revolut to Account in 1.5 hours

I was very impressed with Wisefund, DoFinance and PeerBerry. All of them accounted the money within 3 hours of the payment execution. For DoFinance I even got a payment execution confirmation from Revolut at 13:11 while DoFinance confirmed the arrival of the funds at 12:55 (I still accounted for 5 hours because I initiated the transfer 5 hours before it hit the account).

Bondster and Grupeer probably have setup a once per business day bank import as they both only confirmed the funds on Monday 6th. Crowdestor did take 21 hours and confirmed the arrival of the funds on Saturday!

For Swaper I didn’t get an email confirmation that my money arrived. And for Envestio I’m still waiting for the account verification.

Cash drag right away

Unfortunately the great account top-up performance of Wisefund and Flender were negatively impacted with the lack of available loans/investment opportunities. Both platforms came back with promises that new loans will be added this week. We will see.

Crowdestor didn’t have any promising projects just yet but there are some upcoming ones I’m interested in.

The different Auto-Invest profiles were very interesting to see too. Iuvo Group and Viventor consumed the funds in the account almost immediately. While FastInvest and Bondster seem to have a lower or less aggressive Auto-Invest timing.

Checking 15 platforms is no fun

I realised relatively quickly that checking all the 15 platforms for their status manually will not work. Therefore I did a little coding project on Saturday to automate the login and data gathering of all platforms. I might write more about it in a later post.

Gut feeling about platforms

Based on my gut feeling from looking at the professionalism of the different platforms I so far like these 3 platforms the most:

• Mintos (clearly the most professional one)
• Iuvo Group (A representative called my by phone on Friday pro-actively)
• Viventor (I like the design of the page)

And these 3 platforms the least:

• Agrikaab (Probably the least professional online presence)
• DoFinance (The KYC process had issues and I don’t like the homepage design, I sense some re-investing of the funds to other platforms and just handing 12% to their customers)
• Flender (Very low interest rates and no available loans, Auto-Flend invested in some never published loans as in they didn’t appear on the Marketplace)

Let me know in the comments what you think. If you like the blog so far, please subscribe on the right hand side to get email notifications when I write new blog posts.