P2P Lending – The good, the bad, and the ugly

Dear readers,

Today we’re going to talk about P2P Lending / Crowdlending, and we’re going to do it with the help of a guest: Mr Cheese from Fondue Blog.

I know the topic is hot and controversial, and I’m with you, dear angry reader. I’m part of the angry crowd.

But I wanted to share an open, honest and hopefully constructive discussion on my blog anyway. It started between me and my guest, and hopefully it will continue in the comment section and/or in a follow-up post.

I’ts been very useful to me so far, and I hope you find it useful as well 🙂

The agenda for today is the following:

1) RIP’s Introduction: my backstory with Crowdlending, my backstory with Mr Cheese, my strong concerns with current Crowdlending landscape.

2) Guest post by Mr Cheese: intro to P2P Lending.

3) Q&A with Mr Cheese: I asked him provocative questions, and he provided his answers. Let me thank him for his effort in advance. It must not have been easy, I’ve been pretty harsh, rude, and provocative.

Let’s start!

First, a disclaimer: I do not invest in Crowdlending, I don’t intend to do it in the foreseeable future, and I have no affiliation with platforms being mentioned in this post. I was mildly interested in the subject before asking Mr Cheese to write this guest post. The work I’ve done on my side for this post gave me a more informed picture of the field, and a taste of the responsibility bloggers and influencers have. The conclusion I’ve drown is that I don’t want to invest in this field which is highly speculative, extremely risky, not-that-awesomely profitable, questionably ethical from an investor point of view, and quadruple-questionably ethical from a salesman blogger point of view. That has nothing to do with Mr Cheese, whose guest post I consider of good quality and transparency. It has to do with my scarce appetite for yet more risk, and the whole can of worms I opened when I started getting myself informed.

Second, terminology: I prefer to use the word Crowdlending because it’s more generic than P2P Lending. Under the umbrella of Crowdlending you can find P2P Lending, P2B Lending, Crowdestate, and more. Here you can find more on the subject.

Ok, let’s start for real!

 

Enters Mr RIP


I’m old.

Here we go again…

Which means I was around when internet was a good thing.

Please, just kill me…

I witnessed the birth, growth, decline and final death of the idealistic phase of the sharing economy. I was around when it made us dream about “getting rid of all the middlemen”.

I was – and still am – a Couchsurfing fan.

I couchsurfed many times, both hosting and being hosted! I bike traveled the south of France for 9 days back in 2009, being hosted all the time for free. I spent less than 100 EUR in 9 days!

I dreamed about the sharing economy killing or bringing down useless costs, like high hospitality costs. Hotels were too expensive for a cheap-ass like me… with the sharing economy we’re going to destroy the system!

Yeah, the good old days where you were an anti-capitalist! Tell me more about that 🙂

Well… yeah, that changed a bit. Do you really want to talk about that? Take your time and listen: we must go back in time until 2002, when I first read Walden, by D.H.Thoreau. A masterpiece in simplic…

No no no, I was joking (I can’t take much more). Let’s move on, please

Ok…. but that would have been an interesting story. Next time, promised!

So I wanted the sharing economy, Couchsurfing in particular, to kill the system! To start a race to bring hospitality costs down by a lot. To kill oligopolies!

What happened instead is that platforms themselves adapted to the system, and the final equilibrium point is ~95% close to the previous one. We didn’t get a revolution, we got Booking and Airbnb instead. And we paid that “minor price lifting” in terms of privacy loss, targeted ads and monopolies.

Same happened with Uber, Amazon, in the world of Music, Video, Software, Gaming and so on.

Sharing economy is dead.

But this is not a rant about failed sharing economy dreams, though that contributed to my detachment from “everything tech”, including my “dream job”.

Exactly, I clicked here because of P2P Lending. Where is the meat?

Crowdlending.

I’ve always been a Crowdlending curious. The first platform I have memory of was Zopa. It came around in 2005, during my “sharing economy enthusiast” era. When I thought internet was undoubtedly good and not a money milking machine. When companies used to have “Don’t be Evil” in their code of conduct. When I used to consider a dream to work for such companies…

RIP, no rants! Where’s the P2P Lending content I clicked on?

Right, right. Crowdlending. Zopa. ZOne of Possible Agreement. Awesome! I’m with you guys!

I never invested in Zopa though, I was just a passive supporter and curious. I got excited by the model: “instead of having to go to a bank and pay 9% interests for a loan while I only get 1% interests on my bank account, why can’t we meet in the middle, at 5%, and be both happy?

Let’s get rid of bankers!

The Zopa hype cooled down pretty soon though. Internet was not as powerful as it it today, and once Italy regulated a bit the field – and Zopa had to stop working in my country – I had no alternatives and my interest in the topic faded out quickly.

F***ing bankers, they’re killing the sharing economy! Revolution!!“, and then I probably shared some memes on Myspace (life was hard back in 2005) and forgot about it in a couple of days.

Btw, Zopa is still active. Why I don’t see it being mentioned in the crowdlending community? Maybe because it doesn’t promise 875845% guaranteed returns?

Note how almost all the platforms mentioned here (this picture is from 2014) are either not operating anymore, turned out be scam (or showing some warning sign), or don’t offer “amazing guaranteed returns” – image credits

Anyway… time passed, Myspace died, Facebook came (yay! more sharing econom… NOPE), and I forgot about P2P Lending.

I re-discovered the topic a couple of years ago, at FIWE 2018

[Commercial break: FIWE 2020 has been announced, and it will be in Timisoara again. I hope I can join this year!]

I rediscovered the topic thanks to Claus, the person behind p2p-banking.com, one of the best websites on the matter. Claus is in the field since forever, and he knows a lot of stuff. He occasionally comes here and comment on this blog, I hope he can join this discussion and contribute somehow.

We had a couple of chats after the FIWE week, and he’s always been nice and transparent. I actually asked him “which platforms should I invest in if I wanted to get started with P2P Lending?” back in late 2018. He showed me first steps, but I never acted upon his suggestions. Too lazy. Too low priority. Too many other things happening in my life (parenting, burnout, midlife crisis). I told myself that “One day I’ll take a deeper look”.

Another nice guy I met at FIWE 2018 is Angelo, the half Italian guy that I recently discovered launched a blog about P2P Lending. Angelo, I invite you to join the discussion as well 🙂

As I said, after FIWE I forgot about Crowdlending. Probably because it’s a lot of work (it’s not as passive as buying ETFs), a lot of platforms to play with, some ethical concerns about high promised rewards, and a “scarred man instinct” that this is a world full of scam.

And then I met Mr Cheese.

I know Mr Cheese personally. He found me thanks to my blog a couple of years ago. We’ve met several times in real life before he decided to launch his own blog. He told me my blog inspired him to start his own one. That flattered me, I must admit it 🙂

I took a look at his blog and found it’s focused on Crowdlending. The topic has been sitting on my agenda since 2005, so a couple of weeks ago I asked him: “Hey, do you want to write a “intro to P2P” guest post on my blog? 🙂

He accepted, and here we are today.

I don’t usually run guest posts on my blog.

It’s not a thing I like much. I like interviews (both hosting them, and participating as a guest), but not guest posts. I’ve only made an exception so far, asking a friend (Mr DIP), to write a guest post about Unemployment in Switzerland – which I plan to re-write in the near future, once I’ll get some first hand experience with it.

My policy for guest posts is: I must know you personally, and I know you know something that I don’t know (yet) in a field I care about.

But I’m also a kind of an asshole.

I won’t just accept your words as the absolute truth and put them online.

I will use the excuse of “due diligence” to get myself informed about the topic enough to have opinions. Future guest posters on RIP, you’re warned 🙂

So right after I asked Mr Cheese to write a guest post on my blog about Crowdlending, I started the descent into the rabbit hole…

And holy shit what I found!

In few words: I’m 95% convinced this is a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who has affiliation with platforms does so because of high referrals. The bloggers who blog about Crowdlending make way more money from referrals than from investments. Like a classical MLM. My opinion is that Crowdlending is the Herbalife of investments, and Crowdlending bloggers are the wannabe Madoff of modern days.

I was close to withdrawing my offer to host a guest post on this controversial topic, but I decided to proceed anyway in the hope to have my position a bit challenged.

After the guest post, we’ll have a Questions & Answers section, where I ask aggressive and provocative (on purpose) questions to Mr Cheese. I know, I’m Italian, I’m passionate. Being nice and polite is not in my blood. But again, I’m here on a quest to find the truth, not to win an argument 🙂

I think Mr Cheese understood that, and didn’t take it as a personal attack.

See you after the guest post for the Q&A!

 

Enters Mr. Cheese


P2P Lending – The good, the bad and the ugly

This is a guest post by Mr. Cheese from fondue.blog

First of all a huge thank you to Mr. RIP letting me write this post on retireinprogress.com. He was the original inspiration to start my own FIRE journey and my blog.

I will give you a quick introduction into the P2P Lending world and the Good, the Bad and the Ugly around it.

What is P2P Lending? – The Good

Peer to peer (P2P) lending is a relatively new (8+ years) old concept of giving investors a possibility to directly invest their money into other peoples loans/credits. It is currently mostly unregulated in Europe and therefore allows for very attractive interest rates. We’re talking between 10 – 20% annualized returns.

You usually have the following parties involved:

  • Borrower: The person that needs a loan for a car, a mortgage or to pay some high bills in a short term. This person gets a loan of 500 EUR in March and pays back 510 EUR in April. That’s an annualized interest rate of 24%.
  • Loan Originators (LOs): They hand out the loans and take a cut of the annualized interest rate. For example 12%. Then they sell 500 EUR of that loan to P2P Platforms with an annualized interest rate of 12% paying effectively 505 EUR.
  • P2P Platforms: The platforms connect LOs with Lenders/investors and take another cut of the cake (let’s say 2%), and then sell the same 500 EUR loan to Lenders with an annualized interest of 10% paying effectively 504.17 EUR.
  • Lender: This is the investor that wants to benefit from the attractive interest rates and buys all or a part of that 500 EUR loan getting a 10% annualized return.

There are different types of P2P Lending:

  • Peer to Peer (P2P): You invest in loans of actual people that struggle paying bills, need a new car or can’t get a mortgage on the regular market. Usually thru Loan Originators.
  • Peer to Business (P2B): You invest directly in businesses which like to grow their business, develop a new product or pay for some supplies.
  • Real Estate Crowdlending: You invest in financing a real estate project, these investments usually take a while (1-2 years) before they start paying interest. Because there is nothing generating profits at the time of investing.

There are dozens of different platforms covering the mentioned types above. One of the most popular P2P platforms is Mintos. The platform offers P2P loans and connects lenders with 67 loan originators from different countries. It currently manages 5 billion EUR worth of loans. Head over to my blog to find out more about the investing options I use on Mintos.

The Risks – The Bad

With high returns come high risks. P2P Lending is still mostly unregulated in Europe. Most of the platforms are in baltic countries with close to zero regulations. The chinese P2P market has seen a collapse after the government started regulating the space.

The risks around P2P lending can be displayed like a pyramid:

So the three main risks are:

  • Borrower: The person that asked for a loan can’t pay it back. Either covered by diversification (e.g. invest 1000 CHF in 100 loans of 10 CHF each) or the “buyback guarantee” by the LOs.
  • Loan Originators (LOs): There has been about 2-3 cases on Mintos where a complete Loan Originator went bankrupt because they had too many defaults from borrowers. Usually the margins (e.g. the 12% mentioned above) allow to compensate for some defaults, but if there is a huge amount of them no safety cushion can cover that. This can be covered by diversifying over different LOs on a platform.
  • Platforms: Since the platforms themselves have the lowest risks as they are just connecting the borrowers/LOs with lenders/investors, the chance of a whole platform collapsing is relatively small. However if a platform collapses the chance of seeing your investments again is almost zero due to the unregulated space.

The likelihood of any of the risks manifesting depends on the P2P type. Platforms which work with handpicked Businesses or Real Estate projects are more likely to cause problems than large platforms like Mintos which work with a big amount of different Loan Originators.

The “buyback guarantee” mentioned above usually means that a LO will buy back the principal amount of the loan if the loan defaults, meaning if the borrower can’t pay back the loan for some reasons they will reimburse the Lenders investment. This works fine unless there are a lot of defaults or if there are “bank runs”.

Beware of Scams – The Ugly

In December 2019 a platform called Kuetzal suddenly collapsed after a few bloggers noticed irregularities in the projects they offered. They also seemingly changed the company owners and executives shortly before that.

The owners of the platforms vanished and the investors lost a lot of money. This platform collapse triggered a “bank run” on other P2P Platforms which at that time had “buyback guarantees” promising to pay back the invested amount with a 5% penalty or by withholding all accrued interest. This led to the collapse of another platform called Envestio. Which first pretended to be under hacker attacks and then on January 21st 2020 completely disappeared too. I fortunately avoided the Kuetzal scam but lost 2000 EUR in the Envestio case.

The morale of the story is that you should do your due diligence before investing in any of the P2P platforms. They are high risk, high return investments and currently still unregulated in most EU countries. 

Things to look out for:

  • Does the platform mention their owners and staff? Do these people exist (LinkedIn profiles etc.)
  • Does the platform have an official company registration at the address they claim to be?
  • Does the platform reveal the names of the Loan Originators? Do those LOs exist?
  • Does the platform post their financial details (revenue, investors, etc.)?

Always remember to ONLY invest money you can afford to lose.

Thanks a lot for reading. And thanks again to Mr. RIP for giving me access to such a broad audience.

If you like to find out more about P2P investing and follow my journey to FIRE feel free to head over to my blog at https://fondue.blog

 


Welcome back!

Thanks for your guest post Mr Cheese 🙂

I’m happy to have hosted you here, it gave me motivation to do my own study on the topic.

Let’s start with the Q&A:

We’re going toward a world with very low “fixed income” yields. FED lowered the interest rate by 50 basis points in early March and now 10 years US Treasury Bills are trading at 0.5% Yield. Crowdlending Platforms are claiming 10+% with buyback guarantee. Don’t you think this seems  “too good to be true”? If that’s true, why not take a loan to invest in loans?

The global markets are tanking right now due to the Corona hysteria, but exactly that economic downturn will very likely lead to more people looking for pay day loans and consume credits down the road which the Crowdlending Platforms stimulate. P2P Lending is high risk, high return investments and the chance of total loss of money are very real. It’s a bit like the wild west, since the P2P space is not yet heavily regulated the returns and risks taken are higher.

Do you think it’s fair to advertise that Crowdlending platforms yield “profits of 10+% guaranteed”? Do you think bloggers who advertise that do so because (1) that increases their affiliate marketing revenues (2) they really believe that’s true (3) it is true (4) any other reason I’m missing?

My monthly returns from the platforms so far show that most platforms over exaggerate their “guaranteed” returns. So I guess it’s a mix of both (1) and (2), there are several bloggers invested in different platforms for 2-3 years and at least claim to have somewhat steady returns.

I’ve grown suspicious of businesses who have a highly rewarding affiliate programs. My opinion is that if they can give a salesman a huge share of their profits, it means they’re charging too much to the customers. The more the middlemen take, the less is left for the real user/customer – which is the person the salesman is targeting. Crowdlending platforms reward affiliates/salesmen with very high referral fees and sign-in bonuses for new customers (I’ve seen some offering “5% cashback and 10% interest in first 30 days”). Don’t you think this also seems “too good to be true”? Where’s the trick? What’s your opinion on that?

As I outlined in my post the Platforms definitely take some part of the interest in the middle. Giving up on the margin for a limited time to get some longtime customers however is in my opinion a legitimate growth strategy. I know of retail companies where up to 50% of the sales prices goes to marketing. I also have to say that I sucked at selling stuff my whole life.

Do you think that the recent shutdown of several platforms – Kuetzal (1, 2, 3), Envestio (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), Lendy (1, 2, 3), Moneything (1) – is just bad luck, a sign of an industry which is maturing, an inevitable thing when you promise 10%+ returns to investor and high referral and sign-up bonuses (hint: this is RIP answer), or something else I’m missing?

It’s an unregulated market and unregulated markets do attract bad actors. Kuetzal and Envestio were relatively obvious black sheep with many red flags like the owner change and management chain replacement (easy to say in hindsight -.-). The good thing with those platforms going up in flames however is that many other platforms feel the pressure to become more transparent and reveal their financials etc.

Why are most of the platforms located in Estonia? At least most of those who claim high 10%+ guaranteed returns. Doesn’t it look strange to you?

Why are many of the world’s biggest banks located in Zurich? Estonia seems to be a Fintech hub so the location could be just opportunistic. On the other hand Estonia doesn’t seem to have any regulation on P2P lending and therefore might be a good base to operate of. I wouldn’t get too hung up on the 10% returns, as mentioned in my post if you hand out a person 500 EUR and get back 505 EUR one month later already translates to 12% annualized returns.

There are Swiss Crowdlending platforms: Cashare, Lend, Creditgate24, Crowd4cash… I found a very long list here! But nobody in the PF community recommends them. What do you think it’s the main reason? Low yield? No/low affiliate links? Regulations?

There are regulations in Switzerland which limit consumer credits to annualized interest rates of 9.99%. So yeah the yields are therefore rather low. If I were happy with some 5% yields I would invest in dividend stocks 😉

How many middlemen are involved in a Crowdlending project? I mean, if I get 10%+ guaranteed, how many entities are also getting their 10%+ guaranteed? The platform itself? The Loan originator? Insurances? Credit Collectors?

As outlined in my post there is usually the chain of Investor -> Platform -> Loan originator -> Lender. I assume that the LO’s get the biggest share as they have the work of finding trustworthy lenders.

As a follow up of my previous question, what interest rates are the loan requestors (Borrowers) paying for their loans? Who would pay 25%+ for a loan in this low yield environment? Are you ok with the ethical implications of lending money to people at 25% interests?

Yeah 25% is about the rate I could imagine. Most loans I’ve manually looked into are from people from Spain, Poland, Portugal. Usually 40+ years old and looking for 500 – 1000 EUR to pay some bills. I can imagine that if you live on a low income with no/low savings and then suddenly face a huge tax or doctor/dentist bill don’t have the option to go to a bank and get a nice 3% or lower short term loan. 

Yes it might be ethically problematic to be part of such a predatory scheme of lending money but on the other side those people would face much worse consequences if they don’t get any money at all. So you can lay out the ethical implications either way, I help people to keep a roof over their head but at the same time they won’t be able to save any money due to the high interest rates.

The Personal Finance community is not welcoming Crowdlending bloggers. I bet it’s because most of them make more money from affiliate marketing than Crowdlending itself. This model is not far from MLM or Ponzi Scheme. What’s your opinion about it?

I got a bit concerned about that topic too, especially seeing the large single digit extra investments out of the blue from financiallyfree.eu. But then one could argue that the regular stock market is a ponzi scheme too. If any FIRE blogger blogs about some niche ETFs he recently bought and several hundreds or thousands follow I’m sure that they won’t mind the appreciation of the ETF. As far as I can tell is that affliate marketing always worked somewhat like a ponzi scheme, one person benefits from multiple others following their advice. Is it morally questionable? Very likely, is it illegal? No.
I can understand that bloggers want to generate money for the time they put into writing articles as long as they are not plain decisive.

Some of the P2P Lending bloggers received serious threats. One had to shut down her blog, another one has been accused of milking and scamming readers, making 30k per month out of referrals. Even on the MP Forum P2P Lending doesn’t get much love (1, 2, 3, 4). What’s your opinion about that?

Yeah that was sad to see. Thanks for linking my marketing attempt in the forum, there was some very cold wind blowing against my face there. I’m personally primarily blogging to tell the world my story on how I want and hopefully will reach FIRE. Having some audience and readers while doing that is also nice, my hope would be that they keep me honest on my goals and raise concerns and questions. If it generates some income stream on the side that’s nice to have.

The two examples you’ve mentioned regard threats were very concerning and reaffirmed to me that it’s not a good idea blogging with your real name. You told me the story with the 30k per month out of referrals and at that point I think the motivation of the blogger can be quickly be corrupted. I’m not sure if there are other types of influencers (e.g. Instagram, TikTok or whatever) which receive similar threats because they advertise some crap or shady product.

Do you consider affiliate marketing a responsibility toward the readers? Do you consider yourself a “salesman” for the companies you recommend?

I think if I write about some platforms and then readers decide to sign-up it’s a nice to have if I get some commision for it. However I think I wasn’t acting like a “salesman” in any way so far. I will not write nicer or more positive about a platform just because the referral bonuses are higher. Instead I try to focus on finding the “safest” platforms for my money with a 12%+ yield, in the end I hate losing money myself and I certainly don’t wish anybody to lose their money because of me.

You have affiliation with ALL the platforms you invest on. Given the high risk of them being a scam, are you ok with that? Didn’t you run some background checks on them?

That’s my attempt of being subjective, I didn’t remove any platform from the lists yet because my post series on technical analysis of the platforms is still pending. I initially selected the platforms by scraping together the returns of 7 european blogs and then invested in the ones that based on that data yield 12%+ per year. The selection process is documented in one of the first blog posts too.

in your March Portfolio Update you said you don’t recommend Monethera. Your words: “Monethera is also on the list of possible scam platforms. I definitely do NOT recommend to invest in this platform at this point”… But you still show an affiliate link in both that post and in your referrals page.

I fail to see the question here. But yes I will start my technical analysis aka background check blog series with the questionable platforms first and then remove them if evidence supports the theory of it being a scam.

Some of the platforms you still recommend have been mentioned elsewhere to be at high risk of being a scam, like Wisefund (1, 2), FastInvest (1), and Bondora (1, 2)

I don’t recall recommending Bondora, I have invested in Bondster. And Wisefund and FastInvest I pointed out in my blog that I will not continue with them.

Do you have any legal disclaimer that protects you from angry readers if/when one of the platforms you recommend goes bust?

I clearly state in the About page of my blog that my journey to FIRE is my personal experience with the platforms and that I don’t give investment advice. I don’t feel responsible for crashing platforms as that’s outside of my control.

How do you pay taxes on Crowdlending returns? Can you deduct losses if/when a platform goes bust?

That’s one of the reasons why I only started to invest in P2P in January 2020. I leave the tax topic up to my future self to figure out. However being Swiss and considering optimizing taxes as a sport, I will surely try to deduct the losses from the profits.

Can you make an “end to end” analysis of real profits from a Platform? I mean, I assume you’re not able to lend all the money on each platform at a high interest, plus there are costs (custody fees, taxes, defaults, deposit/withdraw fees…). What’s the real (not good-for-marketing) return on your money?

Of my investments of 56k EUR (60k – 2k Envestio – 2k Agrikaab which never payed interest yet) I effectively generated 425.13 EUR in profits which would translate to a yearly interest rate of 9.1%. Unfortunately worse than the stock market in 2019 but way better than the stock market in 2020 🙂

How passive can Crowdlending investing be? I mean, how much would I lose if I want to devote zero time to it compared to someone who spends a lot of time on the platform?

Almost all platforms I use have some form of AutoInvest option where you define the desired loan terms, interest rate and loan originators / countries and then it’s fire and forget. That way it’s actually more likely to automatically invest in available loans which you wouldn’t even have a chance to pick manually because they’re filled so quickly. So added time investment doesn’t translate into higher returns. I personally check my accounts every 2 weeks or so and see if there is some cash drag (uninvested money) due to generally lower interest rate loans and then adjust those platforms directly.

How liquid is the investment? Can I get my money out with a couple of clicks and ZERO costs?

Depends on the platforms. The platforms with secondary markets usually allow you to sell your loans either with a discount or a premium and depending on the interest on other parties you could be out very quickly. See the experiment of liquidating a 1 million EUR portfolio within 72h. Besides that you have to be conscious about the loan terms you’re investing in when setting up the AutoInvest settings. I usually go for up to 12 months on most platforms as I don’t foresee needing the money I’ve invested in the P2P portfolio in the short term.

Thank you for your time Mr Cheese 🙂

Thanks for having me Mr RIP, is the board game night still up?

Of course it is! I already set up the game, served a couple of beers and turned the radio on!

Disease the rhythm of the night!

Well, maybe it’s better to wait until the IRL game plays out, else (NO SPOILER) we end up playing directly “season 2” 🙁

Keep up the good work Mr Cheese!

 


We’re almost done.

There are aspects of P2P we didn’t touch:

  • Buyback guarantee: is it bullshit or not?
  • Crowdlending platforms who raised initial capital via ICO (nice post by Jean Galea here)
  • Regulations risk (see this MP forum thread)

I also want to drop few other interesting links here for those who want to dig deeper:

  • A list of P2P bloggers who lost money with recent scams, by Kristaps Mors (link)
  • What P2P bloggers learned from Envestio and Kuetzal scam, by Kristaps Mors (link)
  • A less dramatic but still negative P2P experiences on the MP forum (link).
  • An amazing spreadsheet to evaluate a P2P platform, by Kristaps Mors (link)

Kristaps Mors summarized it very well:

https://kristapsmors.substack.com/p/how-much-did-the-p2p-bloggers-lose

And also:

https://kristapsmors.substack.com/p/are-p2p-bloggers-the-worst-investors

I have many follow up questions for Mr Cheese, but the post is already too long even for my blog.

I have high expectations of the technical analysis / background checks that Mr Cheese will perform on the platforms he invests on.

I’m confident that Mr Cheese is the outlier in Kristaps Mors’ crowd of P2P bloggers 🙂

Time will tell.

 


Now it’s your turn!

I hope we can start a constructive discussion in the comments.

Anything you want to ask Mr Cheese?

Anything you want to add to the discussion?

Have a nice day!

19 comments

  1. Hi Rip,

    nice seeing you a post on the topic and thx for linking to my blog p2p-banking.com.

    Of course I needed to reply after you claimed “I’m 95% convinced this is a Ponzi scheme”.

    First. P2P lending is a high risk investment. In my view higher risk then passive (e.g. ETF) investing on the stock market.
    But scams are the exception, not the rule.
    I started to lend on p2p lending platforms in 2007 and while a bit of money on some platforms (due to defaults of loans) overall, I have had very good results over the years. E.g. with Bondora, especially in the early years, but also with Estateguru, Mintos and many other platforms. I might not be the “average” p2p lending investor since I am not passive, but rather like to test out new features and strategies to find out how to use them to my advantage and optimize results. I did a lot of trading on the Bondora and Mintos secondary market. As a result my NAR on Mintos over 5 years is 23.9% p.a.

    https://www.p2p-kredite.com/diskussion/viewtopic,p,138230.html#138230

    Secondly, most investors entering p2p lending today seem to associate it with payday loans issued by loan originators (as per the Mintos model). But that is a rather recent model. “Classic” p2p lending marketplaces facilitate loans directly between lenders and borrowers (e.g. Zopa, Bondora, Linked Finance, Estateguru). They do take a fee, but there is no huge spread in the interest fees. With several Mintos LOs the spread between lender interest and borrower interest can be a couple of hundreds percent.

    I am critical of the buyback guarantee. It is not a guarantee, as Aforti, Rapido, Eurocent and other incidents have shown, but rather a marketing promise that has little substance. It does not remove the default risks but rather obcures possible early wanring signs. On marketplaces without a buyback guarantee I can download the loan book and do cohort analysis to see if there are any (negative) trends in defaults levels. That does not work with the loan originator/buyback model. When it’s gone, it’s gone. But it’s not a scam. Just a high risk investment.

    I like to spread my p2p lending investments geographically and over different loan types (consumer, property, SME) – I did an article on it here:

    http://www.p2p-banking.com/countries/uk-review-my-p2p-lending-portfolio-may-2019/

    I am not going for the platforms advertising the highest interest rates but rather like a mix of platforms that have ideally several years track record.

    Preferences differ. On my German forum there are ove 3000 p2p lending investors discussing and every type of opinion and risk degree is expressed there up to leveraged investment in p2p (that is taking out a bank loan and then investing it in p2p loans).

    P2P lending has developed a lot in the 13 years I have covered it. In part it got more professional with more refined processes (=lower risk) but on the other hand there are now niches for everything including those taking very high risk approaches. Some of the attention is focussing on these pockets of extremes which in my view distort how some newbies see and perceive p2p.

    But for the record. Up to the end of January >75% of my investments was in ETFs. I always saw p2p only as a diversification of my investment. And a playground, due to my professional interest in the field.

    This is probably a very general reply. If you want an answer on something specific, let me know.

    P.S.: I had to remove 2 links where the xxx are, as the blog thought my comment to be spam

    [EDIT by RIP: XXX substituted with the links]

    1. Thanks Claus for your amazing contribution.

      First: I think my default spam filter setting is that comments with 2 links are considered as spam. Well, congrats for the choice of “XXX” as a replacement, it’s definitely something that spam filters love 😀 – I also fixed “the person behind p2p-banking.com”. Thanks for debugging!

      About the content of your comment: I know you’re not the average P2P investor out there, I consider you one of the most knowledgeable person worldwide.

      Holy crap, almost 24% per year? Since? Wow, I’m impressed!

      Do you also disclose absolute value? What’s your passive income each month? What about referral revenues per month? Those would help putting things in perspective.

      “With several Mintos LOs the spread between lender interest and borrower interest can be a couple of hundreds percent.”
      This is a good news, a real “cut the middleman” thing, or at least “shrink the middleman”. Why on some platform/model Loan Originators take 12% and on some other in the range of 0.0X%? It seems weird to me.

      About your German forum, what’s the link? I remember you had both a ENG and a DE site, but I couldn’t find the DE one (well, I didn’t spend much time).

      “P2P lending has developed a lot in the 13 years I have covered it. In part it got more professional with more refined processes (=lower risk) but on the other hand there are now niches for everything including those taking very high risk approaches. Some of the attention is focusing on these pockets of extremes which in my view distort how some newbies see and perceive p2p.”

      This is a very good point, and that’s what skewed my perception. That’s why I came to conclusion that “it’s full of scam”. Of course I’m here to get my viewpoint challenged, and you’re doing an amazing job 🙂

      Thank you so much Claus. If I’ll ever change my mind about investing in P2P, I’ll come to you with more questions 🙂

      1. Hi Rip,

        the first link (see above) has some absolute values too. At the height of my Mintos investment I had 25K invested there. Mintos was from early 2015 to end of 2019.
        P2P Lending in total tops (all platforms see 1st link), was high 5 digits.

        The German language forum is at https://www.p2p-kredite.com/diskussion/
        Actually asides from German speaking Swiss, Austrian and Luxembourg residents there is since last year an increasing number of Spanish, Portugeese & Italian visitors reading it with Chrome browser or Google Translate.

        Will be interesting to see how p2p lending will perform in the current crisis. I always said consumer p2p lending will fare okay in a recession, but I am not sure if the current situation will resemble a recession scenario.

        P.S.: I started reentering (rebuying) ETFs today. Will see if that was too early. Bought 1/8 back today.

  2. Anything you want to add to the discussion?
    I’m happy and surprised to read about croudlending on rip.com

    I read a ton about it in 2015 and started investing back then.
    My investments:
    1. cashare.ch: biggest investment, which gave a nice return until I had some credit losses in 2019. Set my return to 0 % after 5 years. I could have performed much better, but i was to lazy to diversify more. (Mostly because I thought the new KMU credits are quite safe)

    creditgate24.ch: This platform shared the credit losses over all investors which is a nice and very unique system. Returns are more around only 5 % because of this.
    Bondora: Invested 2k EUR in 2015 and after turning off the auto-investor i’m still at only 1900 cash in my account. If I get back my 2k after these 5-6 years I’m happy. Another 0 % experiment.
    Mintos: Invested 4k EUR in summer 2018 which do perform quite ok for now. Overview tells me its 11% return, but Bondora did the same for years. I will be happy to have 5 %.

    1. Hi Jochen, thanks for your contribution 🙂

      Finally someone using Swiss platforms! And confirming that if you’re playing the passive game you’re not going to win big 😉

  3. Just wanted to add that I am a very passive P2P investor and let the platform do the work.
    Probably I will stop investing in P2P for now as the collapsing stock market is now a far more interesting investment case.

  4. Hey RIP, seeing the full blog post is great. I can see I had zero convincing powers 😀 I’m very thankful anyway that you gave me some platform and the chance to try.
    Looking forward to that beer (I’m not infected, pinky promise).

    1. That’s not true!
      I’ve been very hard with my questions, and I’m a bit sorry for that… but those were the questions that I had in my mind.
      I hope you got a chance to also ask yourself relevant questions, and maybe – if you didn’t know about him – I helped you connecting with Claus, which is a kind of P2P Jedi Master in the field.

      We’ll drink the Corona when it won’t be a prohibited word anymore 😉

  5. Superb article!
    Also, thanks for referring my blog.
    Just like Kuetzal article I have another one for Envestio. As I can’t link paste the link here because of the anti-spam, you can find it on the front page of the blog.

    Best wishes!

    1. Hi Lukas, thanks for stopping by 🙂
      I think there are enough articles about Envestio already linked, but I’m sorry to hear that anti spam filter filters out comments with a single link. It shouldn’t happen.

  6. Has anyone here used the ethical crowdlending platform lendahand.com? I read about it awhile ago in a British newspaper and was thinking of trying it out. It’s based in Holland and has existed for quite a while. The advertised returns are 2% – 7%, much lower than Mintos for example, but probably more realistic, as it’s a form of impact investment. Until now I’ve had no experience with P2P, so it was interesting to read the post.

    1. Happy you liked the article KF 🙂
      No experience with the platform you mentioned, but given its “low returns” I suspect it doesn’t appeal referral-seeking bloggers 🙂

  7. Great post.
    P2p is something I have invested in since 2007.
    Overall retrurnd of 8% irr after tax but huge differences in the performance of some platforms.
    One has an irr of 0.8% and another 24.7% – I only invest in one now and it’s a good counterbalance to stocks and pays bettervrhsn cash.

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