Our inbox is running hot right now. That's no problem
Our last two posts raised several concerns about Latvian/Estonian P2P site Kuetzal. It will take time for the full picture to emerge at Kuetzal. Currently, things do not look promising, as emails to the company go unanswered and (a large number of) withdrawal requests are not executed. Investors have begun to organise potential litigation if the company does not resolve these issues very soon.
Attention has turned to other sites that may have issues, and we have received several questions and comments on this topic over the last month. We thought this may be a good time to publish our first ever FAQ post where we can address the typical questions and comments we have been receiving on these topics, , as well as other topics that regularly come up.
Please continue to reach out to us with comments, questions and suggestions. We read and respond to (almost) all of them, and it helps to keep us on our toes and makes the site better for all. In particular we would love to get more private feedback (both positive and negative) on sites you have invested with. If there certain loans or sites that look suspicious to you, we’d like to hear about them too.
Q1 - You've excluded a P2P site that I have invested in - please tell me why?
We have usually decided to exclude a site from appearing in our comparison tables (or advertise) for the following reasons:
- The site is very new and has no real track record
- The loans appear to be extremely high risk
- Insufficient information is provided about the loans to assess the risk (see our post – Are you investing dumb money?)
- Their are indications of potential fraud (see our post – scam websites)
- Management don’t appear to have sufficient expertise
- Lending performance is poor or deteriorating
- The site lacks volume and may not be viable (see our post – we follow volumes)
We think the above is a decent framework for all P2P investors to use to assess any potential new site they are considering. Explore P2P has taken a decision to take a curated approach to sites that it covers, rather than to list every site that exists (or offers us money). That approach makes us different from many others, but we believe in it.
Q2 - OK, but what are your specific concerns with site [.......]
There are far too many excluded sites for us to publish a detailed post on why we have excluded each one. We regularly have dialogue about this privately with the management teams of certain sites who would like us to provide coverage. There are some sites we may start to cover in 2020.
We have recently received a lot of questions and comments about certain excluded sites that appear to have some similarities to Kuetzal, or have long had rumours surrounding them. As a result, we plan to perform some additional due diligence and research on these sites in the coming weeks and months, and publish our findings. This work is already underway. If you would like us to cover a specific site, please let us know in the comments below. If you would like to help contribute to these efforts, please email us!
Q3 - Can you send me your blacklist?
In the past we have published a post explaining in detail why we don’t cover some P2P sites, and the main reasons why. We regularly get emails requesting the ‘official’ blacklist we keep. Unfortunately that is not something we can hand out. Why? Because there is a regular stream of new, terrible investment sites, and we will not always be aware of all of them. There’s a risk of leaving some of these sites off any ‘blacklist’, and we would also not always have enough information to take an informed view in many cases.
Q4 - How did you choose your Top 10 P2P sites?
We regularly review and make changes to the sites in our Top 10. There are many different factors that go into it. We consider factors such as expected returns, risk, track record, performance trends, management team, and quality of the websites. We also take into account our own user experience as investors in most cases.
We also try to provide a mix of sites that covers most types of European P2P investors – EUR and GBP loans, secured, buyback, sites catering to high net worth and smaller investors. If you think another site deserves to be in the Top 10 please let us know.
Q5 - Can I help out?
Yes! We’ve been started receiving lots of very kind offers to perform some background research and to make site visits. If you would like to contribute to any future research pieces or make a guest post that could help the P2P community in the future please email us.
Q6 - Can I donate?
We have received some kind offers surrounding this, which are very much appreciated, but the answer is no donations are necessary or accepted. We just ask that you use any of our published links to bonus offers or visit one of our advertisers if they might be of potential interest to you. That is sufficient to keep the site operating and our hosting costs covered.
Q7 - Can we pay you to promote our 'P2P' crypto/ICO/IBAN site?
No.
Q8 - I made a comment on a post but it is not showing up. What happened?
Like most websites we have to use spam protection to protect our comments section. Sometimes that results in genuine comments getting filtered out, particularly if there are links to other sites in the comments. If this happens please email us and we will be happy to find and publish your comments.
I find Swaper to be similar to Lendermarket and Robocash, but I it looks like you haven’t given any coverage to it. Can you share the reason behind the decision? As a newbie to P2P, I might have missed something.
I would like to get a 100% unbiased review of Envestio.
Several people in the industry have doubts and I would like to understand what you think on their projects and the whole platform.
Thanks Giovanni
Thank you for your excellent work.
For Kuetzal you have written “Investors have begun to organise potential litigation if the company does not resolve these issues very soon.”.
Is there a group of people you know where I could get in touch with?
Thanks from Gabriel from Germany
Hi Gabriel – the litigation group is being organised on the Telegram messaging app – search for group CrowdlendingGlobal. There is another discussion group for affected investors – group KuetzalDiscussion