Jean Galea

There are three sources that I refer to when it comes to market data for P2P lending platforms and the P2P market in general:

• Statista
• Brismo
• P2P Market Data
• P2P Banking

You can usually also find information on each p2p lending platform’s website. If they don’t publicly display this kind of data, I would be inclined to trust them significantly less than if they did.

It’s very important to keep tabs on such data to understand what volumes each platform is generating and whether they are profitable or not.

P2P lending is growing at an incredible rate in Europe and around the world. According to a Mintos statement, the world’s P2P lending market was 26.16 billion USD in 2015, but growth is projected to reach 897.85 billion USD by 2024. If this vision were to come true, the annual growth would be 48.2% in 2016-24, which is nothing short of spectacular.

When embarking on an investment journey, it is important to discuss your ideas with other investors, and make sure that you’re up to date with all that’s happening with your investments.

I have always found that one of the best ways to do so, apart from meeting people in real life, is to be part of online forums. Peer-to-Peer lending generates a lot of questions and discussions, and so forums lend themselves especially well to this type of investment.

Here are my favorite peer to peer lending forums in Europe:

• P2P Independent Forum
• Foro fintech (Spanish)
• P2P Kredite (German)

If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view on everything that’s happening within the P2P lending space, do make sure to check out Euro Finance Blogs, which is an aggregator of all the top finance blogs in Europe as well as news from the major lending platforms. News is available in several languages.

Do you know of any other forums worth checking out? Let me know in the comments section.

I’ve written about what I consider to be the best P2P lending platforms at the moment for investing, however after the debacles on various other platforms during the past few months, people have been reaching out to me to ask about which platforms they should not trust.

I think it’s a good idea to list which platforms I actively avoid so you can do your own research about them and potentially avoid them as well. I’ve had the idea to write this post for a long time but I originally wanted to write a longer post about each of these platforms to explain my reasoning. Until I have the time to do so, I’ll just list them and try to describe in a line or two why I don’t trust them.

• Kuetzal – seems to be a scam.
• Robocash – has regulatory trouble in the Philippines.
• Fast Invest – funded by an ICO and too much focus on the founder’s story, which I don’t find believable anyway. Read my review of Fast Invest.
• Envestio – featured several dubious projects in the past, although things seem to be improving lately. Read my review of Envestio.

Hopefully, I’ll have some time to write about the platforms mentioned above in more depth at a later stage, if they survive till then.

There are some other platforms that I don’t necessarily think have serious management problems or are scams, however, I do avoid them just the same as I don’t think it’s worth the time and hassle to invest in them. Bondora is one such example I can think of. I’ve never liked their branding nor the returns they’ve been able to generate for investors, and although they were one of the pioneers in the industry, they now lag far behind other top players such as Mintos.

Do you agree with my choices? Let me know if there are other platforms you actively avoid investing in and why.

The P2P Platform Graveyard

Several P2P lending companies have gone bust over the past years. Here’s a list of them:

• FundingSecure (2019)
• Lendy (2019)
• Collateral UK (2018)

What’s your prediction for the next one to join the list?