Afranga
7.5
(our review)
With Afranga, you can select business loans yourself or choose SaveSmart, where you only select the term and the platform chooses the investment. We rate the platform 7.5 out of 10. We are particularly positive about SaveSmart, which offers an expected annual return of 8 to 10 percent over short terms.
Contents:
Investing through Afranga involves risks. You could lose some or all of your investment.
What is Afranga?
Afranga is a Bulgarian peer-to-peer investment platform launched in 2021 by lender Stikcredit. It started by offering investments in Stikcredit’s consumer loans.
Through Afranga, you can invest directly in business loans to companies, including lenders that use the funds to finance their own loans. It also offers SaveSmart. You choose a term of 3, 6 or 12 months, with an expected annual return of 8 to 10 percent and monthly payouts.
Investors mainly compare Afranga with Monefit SmartSaver, Bondora’s Go & Grow and Debitum.
Registration
Afranga is available in English, German and French. Since we are Dutch and that language was not available, we registered in English. During registration, Afranga asks about your financial situation and investment experience. Investment platforms must ask these questions under European rules. We answered them quickly and without any problems.
Identity verification takes place through Onfido. You need a passport or identity card and a smartphone with a camera. Our verification was quick and partly automated. We did not need much time to consider the steps or look for further instructions.
A personal account manager who calls you
The personal follow-up stood out. Immediately after registration, we received an email from an account manager. They even called us the next day from a Bulgarian phone number and asked in English whether we needed help.
We kept the conversation short. Partly because we did not like to discuss our investments on the phone and in English, but also because the platform was clear enough to continue on our own.
Ease of use
Payments are processed through Lemonway. You can make a bank transfer yourself, but our first deposit took 3 days to arrive. You can also choose ‘Fast Transfer’. Afranga gives an estimated processing time of 1 hour, and this option was indeed faster. Both deposit options are free.
Fast Transfer is quicker, but you first need to select your bank from a long list, grouped by country. Finding your bank can take a moment, as France and Germany, for example, have many banks listed. As Dutch investors we were happy to see that all major Dutch banks were included, and you can pay by scanning a QR code with your banking app.
With Fast Transfer, you can transfer money using your own bank app, by scanning a QR code.
Investment options
You can invest from 10 euros through SaveSmart or Afranga’s marketplace. On the marketplace, you select the business loans you want to invest in. You can manually choose loans with higher expected returns, but we are particularly positive about SaveSmart.
SaveSmart
SaveSmart offers a simple choice: you commit your money for 3, 6 or 12 months. At the time of writing, Afranga offers expected annual returns of 8, 9 and 10 percent respectively. You receive a monthly payout and your initial investment back at the end of the term.
You cannot select individual loans within SaveSmart. P2P platforms with similar options include Debitum Flow and Monefit SmartSaver. Compared with these, SaveSmart offers an attractive combination: short terms from 3 months, higher interest rates and the option to request part of your investment back early, subject to conditions.
SaveSmart: expected annual returns of up to 10 percent.
Early withdrawals from SaveSmart
For all SaveSmart terms, you can withdraw up to 30 percent of the amount you invested in the previous 12 months, capped at 5,000 euros per 365 days. You pay a fee of 1 percent of the amount withdrawn. Afranga must approve your request, and sufficient funds must be available.
Selecting loans yourself
On the marketplace, you can compare and select loans yourself. You lend money to lending companies, which use it to provide products such as consumer loans and car finance. Afranga lists 6 lending partners: Credirect, Lendivo, Lev Credit, Stikcredit, Swiss Funds and Tiberus.
This choice gives you more control. However, 5 of the 6 partners are based in Bulgaria. Only Swiss Funds is based in Czechia. Stikcredit, Lendivo and Tiberus were also built by the same people. Different company names therefore do not automatically mean that your investments are widely diversified.
Fees and returns
Afranga advertises annual returns of up to 16 percent, depending on the term and lending company. This puts it among the platforms offering higher rates in this market. To access those higher returns, you need to select loans yourself. SaveSmart offers expected returns of 8 to 10 percent.
Afranga only charges fees for early withdrawals from SaveSmart. You pay 1 percent of the amount withdrawn. This fee only applies when you withdraw early. You can only request part of your investment back before the end of the term, and Afranga must approve your request.
We only invest through SaveSmart, so we cannot assess our own returns from individual loans. We have also not been investing long enough to assess our returns over a full term. Afranga does publish platform figures: by 1 October 2026, it had paid out more than 3.6 million euros in investment returns.
Reliability and supervision
Afranga has been operating since 2021. It holds a European crowdfunding licence (ECSP) and is supervised by Bulgaria’s Financial Supervision Commission, the Bulgarian regulator for investment platforms. Among other things, the licence requires your available cash balance to be held separately from Afranga, in a payment account in your name with Lemonway.
The platform publishes information about its lending partners, including annual reports and interim figures. For our SaveSmart investments, we mainly look at Stikcredit. This lender has operated in Bulgaria since 2013, giving it a longer track record than Afranga. According to its published half-year figures, it recorded a net profit of 1.46 million euros in the first half of 2026.
Our review score: 7.5
We rate Afranga 7.5 out of 10. If you can commit your money for a set period, we consider SaveSmart one of the most interesting options among the platforms we have tested. Registration was smooth, the platform is clear and the expected annual return of 8 to 10 percent is high.
Afranga shares financial information about its lending partners. Stikcredit, the company behind SaveSmart, reports a profit and positive equity. However, that equity is partly supported by receivables from related companies, which makes it harder to assess.
We have also not been investing through Afranga long enough to properly assess its payment record ourselves. For now, we therefore see Afranga as an addition to our other investments. SaveSmart is convenient, but for a larger share of our portfolio, we want more diversification across independent lending companies.
Disclaimers
Investing involves risks. You could lose some or all of your investment. This review was written by the editorial team at investmentplatforms.eu and is based on our own experience and assessment. We earn income from advertising and fees paid by providers. You can find more information about our approach on our about us page.
