How CrowdIndex Ranks P2P Platforms

What CrowdIndex is

CrowdIndex is an independent editorial review service for European peer-to-peer (P2P) investment platforms. We are not a P2P platform ourselves, we do not hold investor funds, and we are not a regulated investment adviser. We rank 19 platforms operating in the EU + Switzerland + UK on the dimensions we believe matter most for retail investors: regulatory cover, default track record, concentration risk, yield consistency, audit transparency, operational maturity, and independent media coverage. We publish detailed reviews of each platform, comparative guides, and a numbered ranking that is updated quarterly.

This page documents how we do that work, so you can decide for yourself how much weight to place on our reviews.

How we rank platforms — the six editorial dimensions

Every platform we cover is evaluated against the same six dimensions. We do not publish a weighted formula that converts these dimensions into a single number — we explain below why. Instead, each dimension feeds into the overall editorial score and the score label.

1. Regulatory cover

The strongest signal we have about a platform’s operating discipline is the licence it holds. In ascending order of investor protection:

Unregulated — no financial licence, no formal supervision. The platform is just a website.
AML-only / SRO membership — covers anti-money-laundering rules but does not protect investor money in a default. Maclear’s PolyReg membership in Switzerland is an example.
ECSP (European Crowdfunding Service Provider) — the EU’s 2021 crowdfunding regulation. Operational standards plus a €5,000 single-investor sophistication test for retail. Does not include investor compensation.
MiFID II Investment Firm with IBF licence — the EU’s main investment-firm regulation. Includes a €20,000 investor compensation scheme for platform-side fraud or insolvency. The strongest available cover in EU P2P.

We do not treat licence type as the only thing that matters — a platform can have a strong licence and a weak operating record (or the reverse) — but it sets the floor for what an investor’s worst case looks like if the platform itself fails.

2. Track record of real defaults

Marketing pages quote default rates, recovery rates, and historical yields. We test those numbers against documented stress events: what actually happened when borrowers defaulted, when a war disrupted loan books, when regulators intervened. We weigh observed behaviour during the 2022 Russia/Ukraine LO (loan originator) crisis on Mintos, the 2024 buy-back stress on Lendermarket, and the 60.2% portfolio-in-recovery condition currently sitting on EstateGuru’s balance sheet. We weigh PeerBerry’s repayment of €51.4 million in Ukrainian military loans in December 2024 — a stress test it passed in public.

A platform that has never faced stress is not the same as a platform that has faced stress and absorbed it cleanly.

3. Concentration risk

Concentration risk is the structural likelihood that a single bad outcome (one borrower defaulting, one country becoming non-collectable, one loan originator going bankrupt) damages the platform’s entire investor base. The dimensions we look at:

Single-originator structures — Robocash routes 100% of loans through Robocash Group. PeerBerry routes 83%+ through Aventus Group. Twino’s group owns both the platform and every loan originator. Lendermarket depends entirely on Creditstar solvency. These are not necessarily fatal patterns — but they are structurally fragile.
Related-party loans — when the platform’s owners are also the borrowers or the loan originators. Debitum’s 87% family-network portfolio (per the March 2026 Karsten Aichholz investigation) is an example of this pattern at the high-risk end.
Geographic concentration — Lithuanian real estate, Spanish distressed mortgages, Baltic SME loans. Concentration in one country means exposure to one regulatory environment, one property cycle, one set of courts.
Cap-table overlaps — PeerBerry and Crowdpear share the same controlling shareholders. Investing in both does not give you the independent exposure the brand names suggest.

4. Yield consistency

Advertised yields are not always realised yields. We compare what platforms market against:

Audited annual reports — average actual returns paid to investors
Trustpilot and forum reports from real investors
Independent reviewer measurements (P2P Empire portfolios, Lars Wrobbel “P2P Cafe” tracking, re:think P2P measurements)

InSoil’s realised net yield of around 4.5% — materially below its advertised numbers — is the kind of gap that affects our score even when the platform operates cleanly otherwise.

5. Audit and disclosure transparency

We track:

Whether audited annual reports are filed on time at the relevant business registry
Whether the audit opinion is unqualified (no auditor reservations)
Whether the platform publishes loan-book data, recovery statistics, and default rates in a verifiable way
Whether key personnel turnover (CEO changes, board exits) is disclosed promptly

Five CEOs in three years (Debitum) is a transparency signal. One-employee operational teams running a public investment platform (Reinvest24) is a transparency signal. Audit reports filed two years late (multiple platforms in our coverage) is a transparency signal.

6. Multilingual access, operational maturity, and independent media coverage

The last dimension is a composite of three smaller dimensions that share a theme: how visible is the platform under independent scrutiny.

Multilingual coverage — does the platform serve investors in multiple EU languages or only one? Single-language coverage is a constraint on platform scale and a signal about target audience.
Pipeline activity — is the platform funding new loans every week (active), monthly (mature), or rarely (workout phase)?
Independent media — has the platform been covered by independent journalists who do not run affiliate programmes? Karsten Aichholz, Kristaps Mors, P2P Empire, re:think P2P, Lars Wrobbel weigh more than platform-paid reviews. Investigative coverage is a stronger signal than promotional coverage, in either direction.

Why our ranking is editorial, not algorithmic

The EU P2P review space has tried weighted methodologies before. Sneakypeer published one in 2020-2022 and then quietly stopped maintaining it; their FAQ now acknowledges the platform “no longer actively updates” the scoring. Crowdspace presents an explicit weighted methodology that, on inspection, does not survive contact with the actual platform set — Twino’s “Total funding volume” field shows current outstanding (around €37 million) labelled as cumulative (the real number is €1.125 billion), the “Year founded” field shows the parent group’s founding (2009) instead of the platform’s (2015), and so on. Across the EU sample we studied, no rating platform that publishes a weighted formula keeps that formula current with the underlying data.

We believe that is not a coincidence. Weighted formulas in this space create three problems:

False precision. Assigning a 15% weight to “regulator strength” and 20% to “default recovery rate” suggests a measurement precision that the underlying data does not support — annual reports are filed irregularly, default rates are calculated differently across platforms, recovery is not a single number but a multi-year process.
Goodhart’s Law. Once a published formula exists, platforms optimise the dimensions the formula measures rather than the underlying quality. The dimensions become marketing targets, not operating realities.
Maintenance burden. Keeping a 19-platform weighted scoring sheet current — across regulatory changes, audit cycles, ownership events, default histories — is a full-time data engineering job. The EU P2P review sites that have tried it have all let the data go stale.

We use expert editorial judgement, applied to documented evidence. Every dimension above feeds into the score. The score is not a formula output — it is a considered editorial position that we are prepared to defend and to revise.

What we promise instead of a formula: sourced reasoning. Every claim in every platform review traces to a primary source — a regulator filing, an audited report, a court document, an investigative journalist, the platform’s own published disclosure. Our 19 platform dossiers cite between 33 and 57 sources each. We mark uncertain or out-of-date information explicitly. You can verify our reasoning.

Our scoring scale

We use a 0.0 to 10.0 scale with one decimal place. Scores map to descriptive labels, which appear on each platform card.

Score range	Label	What it means
9.0 – 10.0	Editor’s Pick	Top of the editorial ranking. Strong on most dimensions; trade-offs are explicit and small.
8.0 – 8.9	Highly Rated	Suitable for core retail allocation. Specific concentration or regulatory trade-offs but well-managed.
7.5 – 7.9	Recommended	Good fit for most retail investors. Specific structural concerns to be aware of.
6.5 – 7.4	Worth Considering	Some material concerns. Smaller allocation; watch closely; read the “Things to Watch” section carefully.
5.5 – 6.4	Use with Caution	Multiple risk signals. Consider only as a small experimental allocation.
4.5 – 5.4	High Caution Required	Significant unproven or unregulated elements. Experienced investors only, small amounts.
3.5 – 4.4	Significant Risk Signals	Documented investigative findings or regulator concerns. We do not recommend new investments.
0.0 – 3.4	Avoid Until Resolved	Active regulatory alerts, frozen withdrawals, or documented investor losses. We do not recommend any investment.

Tier mapping (from our Trusted-Platforms framework): Tier 1 platforms typically score in the 7.5-9.2 range. Tier 2 platforms typically score 6.3-8.7 depending on specific concerns. Tier 3 platforms typically score 5.0-5.5. Tier 4 platforms score below 4.5.

Why Maclear is currently #1

Maclear holds the #1 ranking on CrowdIndex with a score of 9.2 out of 10. We want to be explicit about why, because Maclear is not the most heavily regulated platform we cover. Mintos at #2 holds a full MiFID II Investment Firm licence with the €20,000 investor compensation scheme — Maclear does not.

Our editorial position is that Maclear leads on the dimensions where it leads, and we weighted those dimensions more heavily for the current ranking:

Yields. Maclear’s documented yields of 14.5%-14.9% are materially higher than the 8%-11% range typical of MiFID II platforms in our coverage. The gap is structural — Maclear lends directly to small and medium businesses without the loan-originator middle layer that compresses Mintos yields.
Multilingual coverage. Maclear publishes in 6 languages. Most peers publish in 1 to 3.
Active pipeline. Maclear is funding around €6 million of new loans per month and growing. Several of the larger platforms (including Mintos) have been in slower growth phases.
Personal accountability event. When Maclear’s only default — the Italian borrower Vibroedil in July 2025 — went into recovery, Maclear’s CEO covered investor losses personally rather than relying on collateral recovery as the platform’s marketing implied. That kind of personal skin-in-the-game is rare in EU P2P. We weighted it.

What this means for you: if your priority is formal investor protection — the €20,000 compensation scheme — Mintos should rank higher in your personal ranking. We explain this explicitly in every Maclear review and in our Mintos review. The Editor’s Pick is an editorial position, not a one-size-fits-all recommendation.

If your priority is yield, pipeline activity, multilingual access, or personal-accountability signals from platform leadership, our editorial view is that Maclear is the strongest available option in EU P2P today.

We will update or revise this ranking if the underlying evidence changes — a regulatory action against Maclear, a new MiFID II application, a material default the CEO does not cover, or a change in the relative strength of peer platforms.