Lonvest Review 2024: a Peer-to-Peer Lending Platform with Integrated Loan Originators
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 Lonvest, which I added to my portfolio in 2023.
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 Lonvest?
As for all Peer-to-Peer lending platforms, Lonvest is a financial platform that allows investors to invest in loans, along with other investors in order to get interests payments over time. Lonvest is a really new platform, as it was launched in 2023. The company is incorporated in Croatia.
What I really like about this platform is that they completely control their loan originators - which provides additional transparency and stability to the platform, compared to a platform that uses external loan originators. They also focus on complete safety for investors, as well as providing complete automatisation of the investment process & high yields, which is of course something I will verify in this review.
So far they issued on the platform over 220k Euros worth of loans on the platform, with over 100 registered investors.
What returns can I expect from investing on Lonvest?
The returns you can expect on Lonvest will of course depend on which loans you invest in. Currently, with the information from their loan originators listed on the platform you can get up to 13% of annual returns, and they advertise an average annual return of 12% for investors on their main page.
This is good as it is the average you can get on several similar platforms in the field, and I will of course verify that when I talking about how to get started on the platform.
Is it safe to invest on Lonvest?
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 Lonvest
On Lonvest, all loans present on the platform are coming with a buyback guarantee, along with a group guarantee - meaning that if someone doesn't pay back his loan, after a period of time 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.
As I mentioned earlier, they control all the loan originators present on the platform, which is something I'll talk about more when talking about all the loan originators on the platform.
They also put security as the priority of the platform - having for example an AI-powered identity verification process, as well as following all the regulations in terms of GDPR.
You can also read more about all the regulation & legal details regarding Lonvest on their Terms & Conditions page.
The company & the team
As I mentioned earlier, the company is 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, with a direct link to the LinkedIn profile of each of the main team members:
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, Roman Katerynchyk, has a strong experience in the field of finance:
You can see for example that he worked as well since 2015 in the loan originators that Lonvest uses.
The rest of their team is composed of really experience people as well, for example their COO Kate Devyatkina who has over 13 years of experience in the marketing field.
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 Lonvest, they are different from other platforms in the field as they control all the loan originators that are present on the platform. It allows the platform to provide much more stability and transparency, and also provide the group guarantee that I mentioned earlier.
It is also really easy to find more information about the loan originators present on the platform:
I really like the fact that non only they control their loan originators, but also that they actually have a good diversity of loan originators. You can also click on each of them to get more information about their past performance.
Overall, I think it's one of the platform I invested on that provides the best transparency about their loan originators, so definitely a good point for the platform here.
Getting started with Lonvest
It is actually really easy to get started with Lonvest 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 Lonvest, as you can do it via a bank transfer. They support instant SEPA transfers as well, so if you send money from a bank that supports it as well, your money can be on the platform in less 10 minutes.
Once this is done, you can actually start investing in loans on the platform. As a platform that promotes automation, you can only invest with their auto-invest function, which is really easy to setup:
I immediately saw my money being invested on the platform after activating it.
Note that I checked if there were loans at the 12% average 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 Lonvest
With the settings that I used on Lonvest, I should get returns of around 12% 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.
Should you invest on Lonvest?
I can definitely say that I enjoy using Lonvest as an investment platform. It is a regulated platform, has good yields, and also has a great diversity of loan originators that they control in-house, meaning they are a really transparent platform as well. For all those reasons, I can really recommend having Lonvest in any investment portfolio.