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investors
Lendopolis is a French site that lends savers' money to renewable energy projects — solar farms, wind parks, hydro, biogas and battery storage. From EUR 50 you buy unlisted bonds issued by the company that owns the project or by its developer parent, at 6% to 8% a year over four to five years, with the platform not a party to the contract.
Since December 2025 Lendopolis has been a brand rather than a company: its own licence was withdrawn when the business merged into Lendocompany, which also runs Lendosphere and holds one AMF licence, number FP-2023-22 of 7 November 2023, covering both websites.
La Banque Postale sold Lendopolis on 4 November 2024 and owns none of it; the bank still introduces customers but guarantees nothing, and these are not deposits.
The platform started in November 2014 lending to small businesses, a business that went badly and was shut down in February 2019, and has run on renewable energy since.
It has raised EUR 441.5 million across 934 projects and has 71,388 registered members, though only about 24,000 have actually lent.
You need to be a French resident or in another approved country with a SEPA bank account, and US taxpayers are excluded.
Cash sits in a payment account in your own name at a licensed payment firm, but no deposit guarantee or compensation scheme covers what you lend. Investing is free; the project companies pay 4% to 6% of what they raise.
License / Regulation: ECSPR PSFP, AMF France; licence held by Lendocompany
Lendopolis publishes a formal selection policy in two stages. First a technical, legal and financial audit of the asset: equipment quality, the builder's track record, expected output, land rights, planning permits, the grid connection agreement, the power purchase contract or tariff, insurance, costs and financial ratios. Then an assessment of the developer: age, management experience, projects delivered, reputation and technology. Security may be taken depending on the analysis — a pledge over the project company's shares, a pledge over shareholder loans, an on-demand guarantee or a personal guarantee from the director. What is missing matters: no rejection rate, no risk grade, no statement of where you rank against the bank, and no disclosure of which security applies to which deal.
The team that founded Lendopolis is gone. It was started in 2014 by the founders of KissKissBankBank — Vincent Ricordeau, Ombline le Lasseur and Adrien Aumont — and later run under La Banque Postale by Aurelien Gouraud. Since the merger it is run by Lendosphere's people: Laure Verhaeghe as president, with Amaury Blais and Mathieu Rochard as managing directors, in a company of 10 to 19 staff owned by the Paris fund manager 123 Investment Managers. Note that lendopolis.com carries no team page at all — no named analysts, no biographies, no photographs — so from the site itself you cannot see who assesses the projects you are being sold.
No monitoring policy, covenant regime or reporting timetable is published. You get repayment notices and project updates in your account, but the public site shows no status once a campaign closes. The formal default procedure is documented: a formal demand five working days after a missed payment, default declared after two missed instalments or when a court opens insolvency proceedings, then the statutory French insolvency route. In practice the platform often extends rather than defaults — one bond was stretched from 18 to 24 months over investor objections. Where recovery has been tested it has been poor: both legacy borrowers checked on the French registers ended in liquidation closed for lack of assets, meaning nothing came back.
Investing is genuinely free. There is no entry fee, no management fee, no withdrawal fee, no exit fee and no account or payment fee, confirmed by several independent French reviews. Lendopolis is paid by the developer instead, taking a commission of 4% to 6% of the amount raised when a campaign completes — worth knowing, because it earns on money placed rather than money repaid. Tax is the real cost for French residents: a flat 30% on interest, made up of 12.8% income tax and 17.2% social charges, which turns 6.85% gross into about 4.79%. Capital losses on loans made after 1 January 2016 can be offset against crowdlending interest for five years.
Trustpilot scores 3.0 out of 5 from 154 reviews, with 64% at five stars but 18% at one — a split between a happy majority and a badly burned minority. Recent one-star reviews from 2026 describe unexplained account closures, funds blocked for a month, missing interest and an unresponsive helpline. The heavier criticism is historic and was national press. In June 2017 the platform publicly admitted 14 of 152 small-business projects were in difficulty, a 9.21% default rate against rivals at 1.47% and 2.45%, and replaced its entire risk team. It got worse: by April 2018 independent tracking counted 36 defaults plus one incident on 205 projects, 18.05%, and the business was shut in February 2019. Current criticisms are that delays are handled too kindly to borrowers, and that the marketing page shows no unpaid capital while the regulatory page reports EUR 3.08 million lost. No regulator has sanctioned the platform.
No, and it never did. The bank sold Lendopolis outright on 4 November 2024 and owns none of it; what remains is a referral agreement. The platform states plainly that your investments are not covered by deposit guarantee schemes. These are unlisted corporate bonds, not deposits, and the EUR 100,000 of protection a bank customer expects does not exist here.
