How CrowdIndex Ranks P2P Platforms

What CrowdIndex is

Disclosure: CrowdIndex earns affiliate commissions from some of the platforms listed. Our Editor’s Pick and our paying partners are not the same platforms: InRento, currently ranked #1, has no affiliate programme with us, while Maclear, which does pay us a commission, is ranked #3. Commercial relationships affect which platforms we cover and how prominently they appear across the site - these rankings are not independent. P2P lending puts your capital at risk; returns are not guaranteed and past performance does not predict future results.

CrowdIndex is an editorial review service for European peer-to-peer (P2P) investment platforms with affiliate partnerships disclosed above. We are not a P2P platform ourselves, we do not hold investor funds, and we are not a regulated investment adviser. We rank 44 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 (third-party investigative journalism is a signal we weigh). 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 We do not publish a weighted formula that converts these dimensions into a single number - we explain below why.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 44-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. The nineteen dossiers behind our launch coverage 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	Exceptional	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.

The score decides the position. The score is a per-platform assessment on the scale above. The list is sorted by score, so the position - #1, #2, #3 - is nothing more than the rank that score earns. The two cannot disagree: the platform at #1 is the platform with the highest score. Today that is InRento at 8.6, ahead of Mintos at 8.5 and Maclear at 8.4. Editor’s Pick is a separate thing: it is a badge attached to whatever platform holds #1, not a score band of its own.

Tier mapping (from our Trusted-Platforms framework), as the scores stand today: Tier 1 platforms score between 7.3 and 8.6. Tier 2 platforms span 4.0 to 8.5 - the widest band, because a strong licence does not by itself keep a platform out of trouble. Tier 3 platforms sit between 4.8 and 5.8. Tier 4 platforms score 4.5 or below.

Why InRento is currently #1

InRento holds the #1 position and carries the Editor’s Pick badge because it has the highest score in our coverage: 8.6 out of 10, against 8.5 for Mintos at #2 and 8.4 for Maclear at #3. This section explains what that score rests on, and why the two platforms behind it score where they do.

Two things you should know before reading the reasoning:

InRento is not a commercial partner of ours. We have no affiliate programme with InRento and earn nothing from anything published about it, including the review at the top of the ranking.
Maclear, at #3, does pay us a commission. Full terms are in our affiliate disclosure.

What InRento leads on

Loss record over a real track record. 177 projects funded since 2020, €98.92 million cumulatively financed, and no capital loss to investors to date. A zero-loss record over five years is not proof that the next five will look the same, but it is the longest clean record in our coverage.
Security registered before the money moves. Every project is secured by a first-rank mortgage registered before capital is released to the borrower. That sequencing matters: it is the difference between collateral as a marketing claim and collateral as a filed legal instrument.
A supervised licence. A full ECSP licence from the Bank of Lithuania, issued 10 November 2023. ECSP is not the strongest cover available in our coverage - it carries no investor compensation scheme, and Mintos at #2 holds a MiFID II licence with the €20,000 scheme - but it is a supervised authorisation rather than an AML-only registration.
Independent scrutiny. InRento has the highest ratio of tier-1 media coverage in our universe, including a Fortune profile of its founder and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe listing. Coverage is not an endorsement, but the more mainstream journalists have looked at a platform, the less room there is for a structural problem to sit unnoticed.

Where InRento is weaker than platforms ranked below it

We are not asking you to read the #1 slot as “best on everything”:

Two languages only (English and Lithuanian). Maclear publishes in six, Mintos in eleven. On our multilingual-access dimension InRento is one of the weakest platforms we cover.
€500 minimum per project, against €50 at Mintos and Maclear and €10 at PeerBerry and Nectaro. Real diversification on InRento takes a much larger portfolio.
No AutoInvest and no mobile app. Everything is manual and web-only.
One country, one property cycle. Lithuanian real estate, Lithuanian courts, Lithuanian valuations.
Lower advertised return - around 11.8% average, against Maclear’s documented 14.5% to 14.9%.

Why Maclear scores below InRento and Mintos

Regulatory cover is the heaviest of our six dimensions - roughly a quarter of the overall assessment - because it sets the floor under everything else a platform does. Maclear operates under Swiss SRO membership, which covers anti-money-laundering obligations and does not protect investor money if the platform itself fails. InRento holds a full ECSP licence from the Bank of Lithuania. Mintos holds a MiFID II investment-firm licence with the €20,000 investor compensation scheme. Maclear starts a full band below both of them on the dimension that carries the most weight, and that is the main reason its 8.4 sits under InRento’s 8.6 and Mintos’s 8.5.

What holds Maclear’s score as high as it is: the highest advertised return in our coverage at 14.5% to 14.9%, six-language reach, a pipeline of around €6 million of new loans per month, and one documented personal-accountability event - when its only default, the Italian borrower Vibroedil in July 2025, went into recovery, Maclear’s CEO covered investor losses from personal funds rather than relying on the collateral recovery the platform’s marketing implied. Those strengths are real. They are also narrower than they look: the default record is a single case resolved by one person’s decision rather than by a documented process, and advertised yield is the dimension that is easiest to publish and hardest to verify.

InRento’s 8.6 rests on things that are harder to reverse: a five-year record with no capital loss, a registered first-rank mortgage on every deal, and a supervised EU licence. The price of that record is the two-language interface, the €500 minimum per project and a lower return than Maclear advertises.

Reasonable readers weight the dimensions differently from us, which is why we publish the score, the dimensions behind it and the reasoning on every card. If your priority is formal investor protection, Mintos and its €20,000 compensation scheme belong first in your personal ranking. If your priority is yield and breadth of language coverage, Maclear does. The Editor’s Pick is our editorial position, not a one-size-fits-all recommendation.

We will revise the scores, and therefore the order, if the underlying evidence changes - a first capital loss at InRento, a regulatory action against any platform in the top three, a new MiFID II authorisation, or a material shift in the relative strength of peers.