Lonvest review
6
(our review)
At Lonvest, you invest through an auto-invest model that spreads your deposit across a range of consumer loans. We rate Lonvest a 6 and it is not yet on our list of recommendations. Interest rates are high and it offers multiple regions, but the track record is limited and all loans originate from companies within SpaceCrew Finance Group.
Contents:
Please note: investing online through Lonvest involves risks. You may lose part or all of your investment.
What is Lonvest?
It is an investment platform offering loans from loan originators within the SpaceCrew Finance Group. Before investing, you choose a region and loan duration, after which the platform shows a fixed return indication.
Interest and principal repayments are paid at the end of the loan term. Whether repayments are successful depends on borrower payment behavior. Lonvest is still relatively new and the total investment volume remains limited.
Investors most often compare Lonvest with P2P platforms such as Mintos, PeerBerry and Bondora.
Invest via Mintos, with 11.62% average return, or Debitum focused on business loans. Both are MiFID-licensed and top-rated by Investmentplatforms.eu. Investing involves risks. You may lose your investment.
Registration
Before you can invest with Lonvest, you first need to create an account. You register using your email address, followed by a short verification through Sumsub, an online verification service. This process works fastest on your phone. We tried to register in Dutch, and received an error message on the website during verification.
While waiting for approval, you can already deposit funds through a bank transfer. The first deposit may take some time because of the verification process, but after that deposits are credited quickly. We made our transfer from a joint bank account, which was accepted without further issues.
Ease of use
Lonvest’s platform is user-friendly and available in English, German, Spanish and French and Dutch. However, some Dutch translations appear awkward and certain words are split strangely.
Investing works through an auto-invest feature. This is simple to use, but the available settings and information are limited. In the dashboard, you choose a region, Mexico, Malaysia or Singapore, with the latter two added recently. It is unclear how you should make this choice or what the differences between these regions are.
There is little information about historical results or other indicators that would support confidence in the quality of the loans. Lonvest mainly focuses on investment simplicity and potential returns.
For example, we received 1 percent cashback on our investments during the first 90 days. Once your invested balance exceeds 10,000 euro, you also receive an additional 0.50 percent bonus interest rate, which may encourage investors to increase their deposits more quickly.
Offer
Through its auto-invest feature, Lonvest spreads investments within a selected region based on preset criteria. You can also choose whether repayments should be automatically reinvested or kept as available balance without earning interest. Depending on the loan duration, 1, 3, 6 or 12 months, the platform immediately shows an expected interest rate.
Auto-invest operates on a queue method. After investing, the money first goes to the loan originator, that distributes your funds across loans.
Buyback guarantee
You cannot see which specific loans are selected or when allocations take place. Lonvest does display loans on the platform, but these are general examples of previous loans. The risks per region, or the exact types of loans you invest in, remain unclear.
Statistics show that the platform experiences payment delays, but it offers a buyback guarantee for this. If a loan is more than 90 days overdue, the loan originator must repurchase the loan including accrued interest. Lonvest also mentions a guarantee from SpaceCrew Finance Group itself.
Invest via Mintos, with 11.62% average return, or Debitum focused on business loans. Both are MiFID-licensed and top-rated by Investmentplatforms.eu. Investing involves risks. You may lose your investment.
Returns
Depending on the duration and region, expected interest rates range from 8 percent to around 15 percent annually. This places Lonvest among the higher-yielding platforms in the European P2P market. We continuously invest in one-month loans, allowing repaid funds to become quickly available for reinvestment.
At least, if all obligations are met. Statistics show that payment delays occur regularly. For ClickCredito MX, which provides Mexican loans and was the first loan originator on Lonvest, only 22.8 percent of loans were fully current at the time of writing.
The platform provides little information on how it expects to manage these risks over the long term.
Reliability
The platform operates from Croatia under local corporate law. Legally, investors lend money directly to the financing companies themselves. This structure does not require an investment license, and the platform is not regulated under a European ECSP license or MiFID framework. As a result, oversight is lower than on many other European investment platforms.
Lonvest offers high interest rates, but these usually come with high risks. The loan originators and Lonvest itself are all part of SpaceCrew Finance Group. Because the group provides a collective guarantee for all loans, problems in one region could eventually affect the entire portfolio.
As an investor, you are therefore highly dependent on the financial health of the group.
Review score: 6
We rate Lonvest a 6 out of 10. The platform offers high interest rates, a simple auto-invest feature and many short-term loans. Thanks to the reinvestment function, investors can continuously generate returns. Whether this model remains sustainable over the long term remains to be seen.
The track record is short and the platform operates without a MiFID or ECSP license. All loans come from loan originators within SpaceCrew Finance Group, and there are many payment delays. For long-term repayment problems, each loan originator offers a buyback guarantee, while the group itself also guarantees the loans.
However, the actual value of these guarantees is difficult to assess. We could not find official credit ratings from Moody’s, Fitch, S&P or other credit rating agencies. If one region faces larger losses than expected in the group’s own risk models, it remains unclear what the consequences would be.
For now, we are positive about the offer and continue to follow the platform actively, but Lonvest is not yet included on our list of recommendations.
