21000
investors
Lendermarket is a Dublin-based Peer -to-peer marketplace where you buy exposure to short-term consumer loans that have already been issued by lending companies, mainly Creditstar Group.
You are not lending to the borrower. Your money goes to the lending company, and if a borrower is more than 60 days late, that company must buy the loan back at full principal plus interest.
That promise is only as good as the company behind it, and for most of the book that company shares an owner with Lendermarket itself: Lendermarket Limited is wholly owned by an Estonian holding company whose ultimate owner, Aaro Sosaar, also runs Creditstar.
The platform's own About page does not mention this. It launched in 2019, has arranged EUR 610.5 million of loans, holds about EUR 62.8 million out on loan and reports 34,000 registered investors, though independent counts run as low as 21,000.
It has been authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland as a crowdfunding service provider since 17 December 2024, but it runs a second, explicitly unregulated service alongside it, and one 2026 review found most existing loans sit in that unregulated part.
You need to be 18, tax resident in the EU or Switzerland and hold an EEA or Swiss bank account. The minimum is EUR 10, everything is in euros, and there are no investing fees.
Cash is held in separate accounts at a third-party payments firm, but no compensation scheme covers your loans.
License / Regulation: ECSP (Central Bank of Ireland); part of book unregulated
You do not choose projects; you take exposure to pools of consumer loans already made. The real selection is which lending companies get onto the platform. Lendermarket scores them from 1 to 10, where 10 is safest, weighting public trust 35%, finances 25%, legal 15%, transactions 15% and transparency 10%. Creditstar scores 7.83, rated low risk, in an August 2026 assessment. Three problems: the score is produced in-house by a company under the same ownership as its top-rated lender, the heaviest weight sits on a reputation measure rather than finances, and several lenders file unaudited accounts. By comparison, Mintos scores the same Creditstar at 6.0.
The named leadership is Carles Federico as chief executive, in post since September 2023 and previously at Creditstar's Spanish operation, with Aldar Tsybikov as head of finance and Helari Laurent as chief technology officer. But the executives are not where control sits. Lendermarket Limited is wholly owned by an Estonian holding company whose ultimate owner is Aaro Sosaar, chief executive of Creditstar Group — so the person who controls the platform also runs its dominant lender. The Irish company register showed just one employee on the latest filing, though the platform lists offices in Dublin, Berlin, Madrid and Tallinn. Investors have complained about frequent changes of chief executive.
The criticism is extensive, sustained over four years and centred on one thing: money that would not come back. Individual cases from July 2024 include 81% of one portfolio frozen, EUR 41,000 of EUR 72,000 pending, and one investor with EUR 150,000 entirely stuck. Reviewers recorded withdrawals stretching into months and sometimes years. Investors also complained the buyback promise was advertised but not consistently honoured. All of it was settled by October 2025 with full principal and 18% penalty interest, and nobody is documented as having lost money — but 11.7% of the book was still overdue on 3 August 2026..One aggregator puts it near 3.6 out of 5 from about 134 reviews, with roughly a quarter at one or two stars.
If a borrower is more than 60 days late, the lending company must buy the loan back at full principal plus interest, and lenders keep 5% to 10% of each loan on their own books. Delayed money earns 18% a year after a ten-day grace period. The weakness is that the trigger is not absolute: loans can be extended six times in 30-day steps, pushing buyback back up to 240 days, and in 2022 to 2024 real waits reached 720 days. The mechanism has never been tested by a lending company actually failing, only by one running short of cash. Lendermarket itself has about EUR 1.2 million of net assets and could not absorb a failure.
The track record has effectively reset: the current platform launched in October 2025, so the business you deal with today has under a year of history, while the all-time figures quoted span both platforms. And diversifying away from Creditstar has meant adding lenders in Mexico, Colombia and Spain, some with bad-debt ratios above 22% and one with unaudited accounts and a 4.7% equity ratio. That changes the shape of the risk rather than simply reducing it.
