Bondster Review 2024: a Safe Platform with Great Returns
Important update: Due to recent issues with late loans repayments & with withdrawing funds from the platform, I cannot recommend investing on this platform anymore. I contacted the platform about it and will update the review as I receive an answer from them. I left the review below for your reference.
I love to diversify my Peer-to-Peer lending investments on as many great platforms as possible. In this article, I will review the Peer-to-Peer lending platform Bondster, which I added to my portfolio in 2021.
In the article, I will tell you what I think are the biggest strengths (and weaknesses) of the platform, how to start using it, and what you can expect from investing on the platform. Let's start!
What is Bondster?
As for all Peer-to-Peer lending platforms, Bondster is a financial platform that matches borrowers with investors, that will lend money on the platform in exchange of interests on loans. Bondster is based in Czech Republic, and allows investors to invest in Euros but also in Czech crowns.
They currently have over 19,000 investors, with 184M Euros worth of loans already funded on the platform. They have been active since 2017, which makes a platform with already some good track record to look at.
What returns can I expect from investing on Bondster?
Bondster currently advertises returns of 14.77% on average, putting it on the top of similar platforms in the field in terms of returns.
Note that there are no fees to invest on the platform if you invest in EUR, and there is a 1% annual fee if you decide to invest in CZK.
Is it safe to invest on Bondster?
The question of the safety of the investors funds is central when investing on a Peer-to-Peer lending platform, as they will be managing all the money that you deposit on the platform and invest it in loans. When reviewing a new platform before adding it to my portfolio, I look at three things: what the platforms offers in terms of guarantees, the company itself (and their team), and finally the loan originators.
Risks & guarantees on Bonster
On Bondster, all loans are covered by a 60 days buyback guarantee, which is already a good point for the platform. Note that you can also invest in some real estate projects via the platform, however the returns on those projects are lower than the other loans proposed by the platform.
All loans are also attached to a collateral like a piece of property or other assets like a car, that will be used in case the loan is not paid back in time. They are also very transparent on the amount of loans being funded on the platform, with a very detailed statistics page showing the percent of loans that are late or going to default. There are actually very limited amount of loans that even go into the buyback phase, with less than 1% on all loan originators.
The company & the team
Bondster is a company operating from Czech Republic, and they have a financial license to operate in this country. As I mentioned earlier, they are completely transparent about their numbers and publish them monthly on their statistics page.
They also are completely transparent about their team on their website, with a complete description of the role of each person in the team, which is also something I appreciate seeing on a platform. I for example checked the profile of their CEO, Pavel Klema, who has 14 years of experience working in the financial services field.
Loan originators
I also always like to have a very close look at loan originators that a platform uses, as this is usually where a platform will fall short if anything bad happens like a financial crisis.
What I really liked on Bondster is that they are fully transparent about their loan originators as well, and display them on a page directly accessible from their main page. They mostly have loan originators from Czech Republic as well, but also from Spain and Russia. They also provide direct links to the financial statements of the loan originators, which is really nice to see as well.
Getting started with Bondster
It is actually really easy to get started with Bondster, and in no time you can start generating interests on the platform.
The first step is to open an account and get verified. This was done really quickly, and it was all done within 2 minutes.
Next, you will have to deposit funds in your account to start investing in loans and generate interests on Bondster. This is also easy to do as well, with a simple bank transfer. Note that here you will have the options to deposit money either in CZK or EUR, depending on which currency you want to use on the platform. I personally chose to stick with Euros as this is the main currency I use for my portfolio.
Finally, you will have to choose a way to invest on the platform. You can actually invest manually on Bondster, but I'd rather recommend using their auto-invest function, which is really easy to set Bondster, yet with a lot of parameters you can set.
I chose my usual strategy mixing decent yields (above 10%), short term loans to ensure good cashflow on the platform (less than 6 months), and the minimum amount invested in each loan. With those settings, I still had over a thousand loans on the platform matching my criteria at the time I wrote this review.
After that, you simply need to activate the strategy, and you are basically done! The auto-invest function will then automatically invest your money and you will start generating money on the platform.
Having been an investor on the platform since 2021 it is too early to talk about my own average returns, but so far everything went smooth on the platform.