CREDOFUNDING - Risk and return review
CREDOFUNDING - Returns and loss rates
Investment maturity
CREDOFUNDING – Platform statistics 2026
113155
investors
CREDOFUNDING – Pros & Cons
About CREDOFUNDING
CredoFunding is a Lyon-based French platform, founded in 2014, that finances the Christian — mostly Catholic — community: churches, dioceses, monasteries, Catholic schools and universities, care homes and values-aligned businesses. It mixes four things on one site, and telling them apart is essential.
About 38% of the 67.2 million euros collected since launch is donations and reward campaigns — money given away, with a French tax reduction of 66% for individuals.
The investment side is loans and bonds: from 100 euros a unit, paying 0% on solidarity deals and typically 3-6% a year on the current board, over two to eight years, to borrowers like the Abbaye du Barroux (2 million euros at 4.2%) or the Catholic University of the West (4.5%). In total 29 million euros has been lent, 1.79 million euros of interest paid, and 17.7 million is still outstanding.
The platform holds a French crowdfunding licence from the market regulator AMF (number FP-2023-23, granted November 2023), verified on the regulator's list, and money moves through segregated wallets at Lemonway, an ACPR-approved payment institution.
Occasional share offerings round out the range.
The trade-offs are stark: no loan or bond carries any security or personal guarantee — repayment rests entirely on the borrower — there is no secondary market, no auto-invest and no risk grades, and the legally required arrears statistics are published only as picture files that comparison sites cannot read. A flat 18 euro fee per loan subscription falls hard on small tickets. Some 113,000 registered users are mostly donors; active lenders are far fewer.
Regulation
License / Regulation: ECSPR PSFP (AMF) plus IFP/ORIAS for donations | Licence FP-2023-23 |
Functionality
For Investors
Useful Information
A seven-step funnel, published in full and unusual in one respect: the first screen is values, not finance. Projects are checked for alignment with the platform's Christian mission, an ethics committee can be consulted, and CredoFunding reserves the right to refuse anyone presenting reputational risk. Then comes a week-long preliminary analysis of accounts and budgets, a due-diligence interview, financial structuring of rate and term, and a selection committee vote in which conflicted members must abstain. Monitoring continues after launch. What is not published: any current acceptance rate (the last known figure, 28%, dates from 2016), any scoring method, and any minimum financial criteria.
The platform monitors interest and principal payments through each loan's life, takes a 0.83% commission on every instalment — which gives it a continuing stake in collections — and says it implements protections if a default occurs. But what those protections are is not published: no arrears timetable, no collections agent, no recovery record, and the terms page that would spell out default handling returns an error. The deeper truth is structural: with no security and borrowers whose assets are chapels and school buildings, enforcement is not a realistic path. Expect a stalled loan to be rescheduled and extended, not enforced — and with no secondary market, you wait it out.
Nothing negative was found — no AMF or ACPR warning, no sanction, no insolvency, no court case, and searches in French for complaints, defaults, delays and fraud returned only the platform's own pages and friendly Catholic press. But read that absence carefully rather than as a clean bill of health. CredoFunding has no Trustpilot profile at all, no thread on France's main investor forums, and the only third-party review dates from 2016 — its investors come through parish and diocesan networks, not the review-writing crowd, so poor loan performance would not necessarily surface anywhere public. Combined with arrears data published only as images rather than as figures, there is simply no outside check on the loan book. The two documented criticisms are self-inflicted transparency defects: an English statistics page frozen in May 2016 that understates the platform sixty-fold, and a tax page citing rules abolished in 2018.
CredoFunding is effectively one man's company: founder Eric Didio owns and presides over what is legally a single-shareholder company (SASU), and is its public face in the Catholic press and on video. A team of roughly 10 to 19 people works under him, with named colleagues on the lending side and project coaching, but there is no team page on the website itself, and the membership of the selection and ethics committees is not disclosed. That concentration — one owner-director intermediating a 17.7 million euro outstanding loan book — is a governance point investors should weigh. The company is solvent and returned to profit in 2024.
Donors pay nothing. Lenders pay a flat 18 euros (VAT included) per loan subscription; bond subscribers 15 euros. There are no ongoing charges — no management, custody, performance, exit or withdrawal fees. But do the arithmetic on ticket size: 18 euros on the 100 euro minimum unit is 18% up front, consuming roughly four years of a 4.5% coupon; at 1,000 euros it is 1.8%; at 5,000 it fades to noise. The platform publishes no net-of-fee illustration. Interest is taxed as ordinary French investment income at around 30% all-in — and note the site's own tax page is out of date, still citing pre-2018 rules.