One of my favorite asset types is Peer-to-Peer lending, which consists of lending money to individuals via online platforms, in exchange for payment of interests over time. Peer-to-Peer lending has a high-yield, can be completely automated, and also has a low level of risk if you do it right.
In order to diversify my portfolio and reduce the level of risks of my investments, I am always looking to invest in new Peer-to-Peer lending platforms. In this article, I will review Grupeer, a Peer-to-Peer lending platform based in Latvia. I heard many people saying good things about them, so I really wanted to try out the platform myself.
The Grupeer Platform
Grupeer is a typical Peer-to-Peer lending platform where you can invest in many loans and make money when people pay you back with interests, but it has a few twists that make it really interesting.
The first thing is that they mix 'classical' loans (personal, business loans, etc) with real estate development projects, and it's very easy to invest in both at the same time. This is quite different from other platforms that focus on one or the other. Investing in real estate loans is great for an investor, as it gives you additional security to pay back the loan in case something goes wrong.
The average yield across all investors is also around 14%, which is quite high for a Peer-to-Peer lending platform. Plus, there are a lot of loans on the platform that are coming with a buyback guarantee, which means that even if somebody doesn't pay you back, you will still get your initial investment back immediately. This makes it a great platform to invest on, as you both get high yield and very secure investments.
Opening an Account
Opening an account was really easy on the platform. You just need to enter some information about yourself, confirm your email, and you're done. For now, they are only open to investors from the European Union. Once you finish the registration process, you will be taken to the account balance page:
Once that's done, it's time to actually put some funds on the platform. This is also very easy, as you can just do a SEPA transfer to their account. They also recently introduced the option to pay via TransferWise (after I suggested that to them :) ), so even if you don't use Euros as your primary currency you can send money to them without losing money in conversion fees. That's the message I got once they received my transfer:
Note that I only sent 100 Euros on the platform for this review. Indeed, I always first try out new platforms with quite low sums of money, in order to test the waters. If I am then satisfied with what I see, I deposit more money over time.
Investing in Loans
It's now time to invest in some loans! As usual, I first recommend to check out the loans manually, to see what is actually available on the platform:
You can immediately see on those loans that I am looking at here that most of them are real estate development projects. Most of them also have high yields and a buyback guarantee, which is perfect for an investor.
Automating Your Investments
As you might know, I love to have all my investment completely automated, so they are producing 100% passive income. That's why I always invest in Peer-to-Peer lending platforms that have an automated investing function, so I can just set it once and then forget about it. Luckily, Grupeer has such a feature, so I quickly turned it on to automate my investments on the platform. Here are the settings I used:
Once that's set, I just turned it on, and it will now automatically invest in loans that match my settings. It was actually very fast on Grupeer: in less than 5 mins, their algorithms invested in 10 loans that matched my auto-invest settings. The only thing I had to do after this is just waiting for my money to come back with interests :)
Getting Returns
I waited about a week for this review to see the first interests payments coming to my account, just to make sure that borrowers were actually paying back. Here was my account balance at this stage:
Update January 2019: it's now been about 6 months that I invested on Grupeer, so it's time for a short update. Since writing the article the account, I deposited more money on Grupeer, as I had excellent results with the platform. There was a little shortage of new available loans at some point, so make sure to enable the auto-invest function to get all the new loans when they become available. Here is the current state of my portfolio at the time of writing this update:
As you can see, I now have over 2000 Euros on the platforms, and already gained just over 100 Euros from my investments. It's too early to calculate the annual investment yield for this platform, but I can say that I had a great experience with Grupeer so far and that none of the loans I invested in went to default.
Update June 2019: It's now been nearly a year that started to invest on Grupeer, and I am still seeing excellent results. Here is an overview of my current portfolio on Grupeer:
It delivered exactly what was expected and with no losses thanks to the buyback guarantee on every loan. They also made significant changes in their interface, which was welcomed as it was a bit too simple when I first wrote this review. You can see that the auto-invest function is also working perfectly, as I usually don't have any available fund on the platform.
What I Think About Grupeer
I have to say that I was really pleasantly surprised when trying the Grupeer platform. The interface is quite basic but really simple to use. The whole process from depositing funds to getting money back is also great and very straightforward. Finally, they have a great auto-invest feature, and many loans with high yields and a buyback guarantee. At the time I've last updated this article, I was investing for nearly a year on the platform, and only had positive results with Grupeer, so I will definitely invest more on this platform in the future.
So I really encourage to try out Grupeer as well, while also diversifying your investments on other platforms. If you have any questions about the platform or Peer-to-Peer lending in general don't hesitate to leave them in the comments below!