What is Swaper?

As for all Peer-to-Peer lending platforms, Swaper is a financial platform that allows investors to invest in loans, along with other investors in order to get interests payments over time. Swaper is a relatively new platform, as it was founded in 2019. They are based in Tallin, Estonia.

What I really like about this platform is that they offer higher yields compared to other similar platforms - as we'll see in a moment when talking about the potential returns on Swaper. On Swaper you can also invest directly in GBP and not only in Euros, which is something great to have if you are using GBP as your primary currency.

Note that they also have a mobile app, which is also something great to cool to have to manage your portfolio on the go. 

So far, over 274 millions Euros worth of loans have already been funded by the platform.

What returns can I expect from investing on Swaper?

The returns you can expect on Swaper will of course depend on which loans you invest in. Currently, with loans listed on the platform you can get up to 14% of annual returns, and they advertise an average annual return of 14.93% for investors on their default auto-invest function. As I mentioned earlier, this is above what you usually get 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 Swaper?

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 Swaper

On Swaper, 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.

I also wanted to note here that they did a great job in handling the COVID-19 crisis, as they communicated regularly with investors via email, whereas some other platforms in the field communicated very rarely. This is definitely a sign that the company really cares for its investors and a good sign for the future.

The company & the team

As I mentioned earlier, the company is operating from Estonia, and as for all platforms I add to my portfolio I checked if the company was officially registered in Estonia, and it is indeed.

Whereas I had some difficulties to find information about their team on their website (which I told them about), it was really easy to find all the information I needed on their LinkedIn page.

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. Whereas their current CEO mostly has experience in marketing, many of their top investment managers have past experiences at other Peer-to-Peer lending companies, for example at Twino.

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.

It was really easy to find the loan originators for Swaper, and it seems that currently all their loans are coming from a company called Wandoo Finance, present in Poland & in Spain, which is a large European Finance company. Whereas I would like to see more diversity in terms of loans originators, it is great to see that it is a large group with some track record as it was created in 2016.

Getting started with Swaper

It is actually really easy to get started with Swaper 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 Swaper, as you can do it via a bank transfer.

Once this is done, you can actually start investing in loans on the platform. For that, the option I recommend is to use the auto-invest function directly. Indeed, there are many investors on Swaper, and loans tend to go quite fast on the platform. Therefore, it's nice to have the auto-invest function activated to automatically catch loans as they appear on the market.

If you don't want to spend time setting it, they actually propose an "Easy Invest" option that seems really decent:

Of course, I decided to play a bit with the settings as I prefer to have a lower max. investment per loan. For that, you have another option called "Custom Investing".

Here are the settings I used for my own portfolio:

Note that I checked if there were loans above 14% yield, and at the time of this writing there were none available (the best was 13%). Whereas this a bit lower than what is advertised by the platform, it is still higher than most similar platforms.

Once this is activated, it will then automatically invested 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 Swaper

With the settings that I used on Swaper, I should get returns of around 13% 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.