I love to diversify my Peer-to-Peer lending investments on as many great platforms as possible, which is why I continuously review new platforms & share my experiences with those platforms on my site. In this article, I will review the Peer-to-Peer lending platform hive5 which I added to my portfolio in 2022.

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 hive5?

As for all Peer-to-Peer lending platforms, hive5 is a financial platform that allows investors to invest in loans, along with other investors in order to get interests payments over time. Hive5 is a really new platform, as it was launched in 2022. The company itself is incorporated in Croatia, and is operating mainly from Vilnius, Lithuania.

What I really like about this platform is that they offer higher yields compared to other similar platforms in the field - which of course I'll check in details when investing in loans on the platform. They also focus on complete transparency for investors, as well as providing a strong experience in the field with a highly skilled team, which is something I'll also verify in this review.

So far they issued on the platform over 228k Euros worth of loans with an average interest rate of 13.04%, and they have 250k Euros of skin in the game (in the future they want to keep 10% skin in the game on all loans on the platform).

What returns can I expect from investing on hive5?

The returns you can expect on hive5 will of course depend on which loans you invest in.

Currently, with loans listed on the platform you can get up to 15% of annual returns (most loans being in the 13-15% range), and they advertise an average annual return of 15% for investors on their main page, so it seems to make sense. As I mentioned earlier, this is above what you usually can expect from similar platforms, but I will of course verify that with my own investments at the end of the article.

Is it safe to invest on hive5?

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 the 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 source of the projects present on the platform.

Risks & guarantees on hive5

On hive5, all loans present on the platform are coming with a 60-day buyback guarantee, meaning that if someone doesn't pay back his loan, after 60 days the loan will be automatically bought back by the loan originator and the money returned to the investors. This is now pretty standard on several platforms, but it is definitely something good to have for the security of your investments.

They are not yet regulated, but in a recent interview they stated that they will apply for the European crowdfunding license in November 2022, once the framework around the license is officially announced. I will of course update the article once they are in the process of getting the license.

The company & the team

As I mentioned earlier, the company is operating from Lithuania, with a company incorporated in Croatia. As for all platforms I add to my portfolio I checked if the company was officially registered in Croatia, and it is indeed.

It was also very easy to find information about their team, which is something I really like to see on such a platform.

As for all the platforms I invest on, I checked the profiles of the management team of the platform to see their experience in the field. Especially here, as they put the experience of their team as a strong argument for the performance and reliability of the platform.

And indeed, they do have a really strong team. Their CEO for example, Ricardas Vandzinskas, has over 15 years of experience in the field of finance:

The rest of their team is composed of really experience people as well, for example their head of marketing Karolina Staugaité who has over 8 years of experience in the marketing field, including several years at PeerBerry, another platform that I have in my portfolio.

Their CTO Aleksey Kalevich for example also has a lot of experience in the field, as he worked at Aventus before hive5.

So definitely a strong team of professionals with a lot of experience in the P2P lending field, which is a really good point for this platform 

Loan originators

I always checked where the loans are coming from on a platform, as this is really important for the security of your investments. For example, they are responsible for paying the buyback guarantee that I mentioned earlier.

In the case of hive5, they currently work with just one loan originator from Poland, called Ekspres Pozyczka and that is owned by the holding company of hive5. As for all loan originators on P2P lending platforms, I checked that they actually exist as a loan company, and they do.

While it's a good thing to work with loan originators that have really close ties to the platform, I would have liked to see more diversity in terms of loan originators, especially from more countries as well, as they promote diversification as one of the main strength of the platform. 

However the platform is still really young and this will probably change in the future. I reached out to them about this - and they confirmed to me that this is only the very beginning of their expansion plan. Hive5 will phase its geographies into three continents:  1. Europe – countries of target 10+million of the population;  2. Africa – ex-British colonies with a fast-growing capital city-based mobile lending market;  3. Asia – with a fintech hub in Singapore, servicing growing online lending markets like India, Sri Lanka and a few others. Also, investors will be able to diversify their portfolios between consumer, business, real estate, green and venture loans.

Getting started with hive5

It is actually really easy to get started with hive5 and have your money start generating interests on the platform.

The first step is to open an account and get verified. This was done really quickly, and including the ID verification part it was all done in under 5 minutes.

Next, you will have to deposit funds in your account to start investing in loans and generate interests. This is also really to do with hive5, as you can do it via a bank transfer. I also wanted to highlight here that it's possible to directly load your account by connecting your bank to your hive5 account. It worked with my Revolut account for example, so it's a great way to get started instantly and not have to wait for the transfer to arrive.

Once this is done, you can actually start investing in loans on the platform. You can first browse loans manually, to see what type of loans are available:

However to actually invest on the platform the option I recommend is to use the auto-invest function directly. Indeed, this will allow you to set your portfolio settings once without having to constantly invest in new loans. It's actually very easy to setup on hive5, here are the parameters I used for my own portfolio:

Note that I checked if there were loans at the 15% yield that was promised, and at the time of this writing there indeed several loans with such yields.

Once the auto-invest function is activated, it will then automatically invest for you the money that you have on your account, and will start generating interests.

As for all the platforms I review, I also tried to withdraw money, and the money was back on my account in just 1 day.

My Results so far with hive5

With the settings that I used on hive5, I should get returns of around 14% annually. It is of course too early to talk about long-term yields on the platform, but I can say that so far everything went smoothly and I will definitely invest more on the platform in the future.