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Maclear is a Swiss-registered online marketplace where people lend money to small businesses in Europe, mostly through 9 to 16 month loans that pay interest monthly and return the capital in one payment at the end. It is run by Maclear AG from Wallisellen near Zurich.
The company shell dates from 2010 but the platform was built in 2022 and ran its first campaign in 2023, so the operating history is about three years. It has grown very fast: 39m euros had been lent by the end of August 2025 and 140.7m euros by 21 August 2026, across 1,967 projects and 50,590 registered accounts, though only about 4,200 people invested in a typical month. The minimum is 50 euros. Investors pay no fee to invest, deposit or withdraw; selling early on the secondary market costs the seller 2.5%.
Every loan is described as backed by security - equipment, property, invoices, or company and personal guarantees - with Maclear acting as agent for all lenders.
A reserve fund built from 2% of each raise covers interest, not capital, when a borrower is briefly late. The important thing to understand is the regulation. Maclear holds no Swiss financial licence and is not supervised by FINMA, as its own terms say; it belongs to an anti-money-laundering self-regulatory body only. It cannot hold an EU crowdfunding licence because it has no EU company. There is no deposit insurance and no compensation scheme, and any dispute goes to a Swiss court in Wallisellen.
License / Regulation: According to Swiss law, the SRO (Self-Regulated Organization) regulates, verifies, and monitors Maclear.
The platform names Denis Ustjev as chief executive and co-founder and Aleksandr Lang as co-founder and finance director, alongside a chief accountant, a second finance director, a product chief and an anti-money-laundering officer. The Swiss commercial register tells a different story. It records Igor Bannikov as managing director from 11 June 2026 and Enrijs Altmanis as a board member from 8 April 2026, neither of whom appears on the team page, and it records the anti-money-laundering officer and the product chief leaving leadership roles in June 2026. The auditor served only until 28 January 2026 with no successor named. Ownership is not published; one review, citing the 2024 anti-money-laundering audit, puts it at half each to the two founders, both resident in Estonia. The same founders run a second platform, 8lends
Retail sentiment is strong - Trustpilot scores 4.5 out of 5 from 652 reviews - but the record around it is not. Two independent research sites published detailed investigations in 2026 recommending against the platform. P2P Empire, on 7 August 2026, scored it 0.0 out of 10 and said it should be avoided by retail investors, citing no meaningful arrears data, aggressive marketing and the absence of an EU licence. re:think P2P scored it 1.8 out of 10, ranked it 25th of 29 platforms, and documented borrower figures on the site 50 to 95 times higher than those the same companies filed with their own registries. Separately, a site ranking Maclear the number one platform in Europe admits on its own press page that it is a paying commercial partner and its rankings are not independent. Two Spanish sources report a regulator warning dated 11 May 2026 that Maclear is not authorised there, which we could not confirm at source. In the one and two star Trustpilot reviews the themes are verification failures, withdrawal delays of weeks, and unanswered support.
No. There is no deposit insurance and no compensation scheme, Swiss or European - the terms say so. Uninvested cash is held in a separate client funds account, and the legal basis is a Swiss rule under which assets an agent holds for a principal sit outside the agent's bankruptcy. Note also a contradiction in the paperwork: the help centre says the platform accepts residents of 44 European countries, while the general terms say it is directed solely at people resident in Switzerland. Any dispute goes to a Swiss court in Wallisellen.
The written process is clear. If a borrower is more than three days late on interest, the reserve fund starts paying that interest to investors. At 30 days a soft collection process begins. At 60 days Maclear starts legal proceedings and enforces the security. It acts as agent for all lenders in a loan, with power to negotiate, collect, enforce and appoint enforcement agents. The reserve fund is built from 2% of each raise, covers interest only and not your capital, and Maclear says it is not insurance. In practice this is untested. There has been one default, an Italian company called Vibroedil, and one source says the money came from the founders' own pockets rather than from selling the security. Maclear disclosed it three months after the insolvency filing.
