Grupeer

Few posts ago I promised more information on a new portal Grupeer that I am trying out. I have invested just 100€ and been on the portal for 2 months but here is what I have learned so far.

In many ways, Grupeer is similar to Mintos platform. Grupeer is a loan listing platform which provides services to other creditor companies. It mediates car, mortgage, business and personal loans as well as lists bigger developmental projects. At the moment there seem to be 16 loan originators in the platform. 

Making an account is easy, you need a working email address and need to provide your name and to actually use the portal you also need to transfer some money to the portal. The transfer is easy and is processed quite quickly, you need to add your personal Grupeer ID to the payment details/info field. 

Making investments is easy you can pick them from list, read extra info and click invest, add the sum and then it is added to your "shopping basket". When you are happy with the loans you have selected, you can go to the basket, look them through again, delete some or all and confirm all investments you are ready to make. Minimum investment in a single loan is 10€. 

This is how the loan listing table looks:

When using the list you can also use several filters to see just the loans you are interested in. A few weeks ago also auto investment option was added to the portal, it has the same filters as the manual filtering does. This tells me that there seems to be an active development of the portal which is always a good sign!

Some projects (mostly larger developmental projects) tend to have also 1% cashback which is automatically added to your account as soon as you confirm the investment (compared to Mintos where it takes several days to get that money, Grupeer is much faster, but gives always just 1%). These are marked with a blue € sign with an arrow circling it. You can see a few in the image above. At the moment even one 9 month investment option gives 1% cashback, the longest is 12 months and they all are at 14% interest rate- not a bad deal.

You can not filter loans by cashback and not add this as an auto-invest filter. But of course, if you invest in them manually or with auto-invest you get the money credited to the account.

At the present time Grupeer gives on absolutely all loans 60-day buyback guarantee- so if the loaner is late with payments you get back the principal as well as the incurred interest for the 60 days the loan was late. Also most, if not all, loans are listed with 14% interest. Sounds great, doesn't it :)

So high interest and buyback guarantee. Is there something negative or limiting as well? 

• There are a quite limited number of loans currently on offer. So if you would like to diversify across 100 or 200 loans at once- you can't.
• There is no secondary market. So there is no option for a quick exit, but the link to secondary market is already there in the portal with the text "We are sorry, secondary market will be introduced later." so I guess it is coming.
• In general, the maximum amount to add to grupeer account is 50 000€/month. If you wish to invest a larger amount, you will need to provide the bank with additional information. This won't be limiting me in years but might be a problem for some perhaps.
• When manually picking loans it does not tell you that you have already invested in that loan. In auto-invest you can set the maximum amount invested in a single loan so there no double investing to the same loan should happen, but this might occur in manual investing.

All in all, I am happy with the Grupeer portal and hope to be able to add more money there in coming months. And I hope the number of loans they offer will be steadily increasing.