About the Author
Silvère is an economist and IT engineer with many years of experience in business management, FinTech investment and digital entrepreneurship. He chronicles his journey as a P2P/P2B lending and real estate crowdfunding investor on his blog: Just-P2P.com, where he publishes platform reviews, loan originator analyses, rankings, guides, and practical tools.
- Hi Silvère! Thank you so much for joining us today.
To kick off our interview, we'd like to ask about your background and how you got started in P2P investing and crowdfunding.
- Hi Anastasia and Robocash Team.
Originally from France, I have a background in economics and hold a degree in computer engineering. Throughout my career, I've held various roles including project manager, head of European affairs in Paris, company director, and head of a consulting firm in Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Today, I work as a digital consultant and entrepreneur, splitting my time between Europe and Asia for my various activities. Over the years, I've travelled to over forty countries around the world.
I discovered P2P lending in 2019 through an Austrian blogger, Peter Kaiser, who was also a digital nomad and P2P lending investor (thanks to him!). It was a time when you could travel the world and work from your laptop more easily than today, as many countries have since tightened their regulations. I was looking to invest my money efficiently to generate passive income securely, with the ability to access my capital from anywhere in the world. This was just a few months before the COVID-19 crisis hit.
- What inspired you to start a blog about P2P lending and crowdfunding?
- I wanted a dedicated space for my investments where I could centralize the results of my research and analysis, have a dashboard that would allow me to track my investments, and potentially interact with other investors in this field that I knew relatively little about at the time. So, instead of keeping all this work on my laptop, I decided to share all this information publicly.
This approach pushed me to be as rigorous as possible while allowing other investors to benefit from my work and save their time. With my background in economics and computer science, it was relatively straightforward to start providing quality content through a website. And since I quickly noticed genuine interest from other investors, it motivated me to continue all these years.
- Which topics are the most interesting for you to cover?
- I really like the investigative work that involves researching as much information as possible about P2P lending platforms and the listed loan originators. My goal is to provide a comprehensive and factual picture of the players that make up this ecosystem. This includes the founders, teams, financial statements, financial products offered, security mechanisms, and so on.
Over the past few months, I've also been developing analyses of business projects when I invest through P2B lending platforms. Finally, I enjoy covering the technical aspects of P2P lending, such as note issuer systems, Non-Performing Loans (NPL), discounted debts, or structural subordination, which I believe is becoming (far) too widespread.
- What obstacles did you face when creating content about investments?
- On the platform side, the main challenge is clearly obtaining the financial statements from lending companies. These documents are published quite late (by nature), but often excessively so, and when they are available, they sometimes are not audited. This is an area where the entire ecosystem needs to evolve and recognize that these financial documents are our primary tool for conducting effective due diligence as investors. I'm also amazed that some platforms still are unable to provide regular and consistent statistics on the financial products and returns they offer.
On the investor side, the challenge is to engage without being too technical, being precise without being too lengthy, and being objective while giving my own investor perspective. I try to provide technical, factual, and verified information that people can rely on to eliminate cognitive biases and make decisions based only on facts. But this isn't always easy because investors often let emotions override reason (the question I've been asked most in recent years is "Aren't you afraid?").
- From your perspective, what are the main benefits of investing through P2P platforms?
- What I like most about P2P lending is its predictive nature. I can roughly anticipate how much I'll generate over the coming month and have that visibility. This is the opposite of stock market investing, which is subject to numerous internal factors related to the company (strategy, product quality, business model, etc.) and external factors (economic situation, regulations, etc.).
I also appreciate the cumulative aspect since my profits, if not withdrawn, will feed back into my capital and generate further profits - the famous "compound interest" or "snowball effect." And even though it's less true than it was a few years ago, there's still the fact that the income is generated passively on most platforms. Finally, P2P lending has low correlation with traditional markets, which provides valuable diversification.
- Have you faced any challenges or risks during your investment journey? How did you handle them?
- Like any industry, there are moments of crisis, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic when investors were selling significant amounts on the secondary market with discounts reaching up to 20%. In these panic moments, you simply need to listen to good old Warren Buffett and... buy. That's the best way to react to mass panic. You have to look at things objectively, be patient, and trust that if you've done your due diligence and diversification work properly, you are partially protected from risk.
I also experienced the impact of geopolitical sanctions, particularly regarding Russia, though this affected only a very limited portion of my capital. This was more in the context of experimenting with currencies other than the euro, which allowed me to greatly limit the extent of the "loss" (the funds are frozen but not lost at the moment).
- What factors do you consider most important when choosing a P2P or crowdfunding platform to invest in?
- I mainly look at five aspects before investing. The first is obviously the financial stability of the company you work with for P2P lending or that you invest in when it comes to P2B lending. It's like entrepreneurship - you need to choose solid and trustworthy partners. Then come the returns: I don't invest below 10%, which is my lower limit for P2P lending.
Next comes the platform itself: it's not just an intermediary but also an important facilitator and partner that plays a crucial role in due diligence and investor protection. I also pay attention to whether the platform operators have "skin in the game" - their own money invested alongside ours. Then there's liquidity - I like to keep around 25% of my P2P lending assets as liquid as possible. Finally, diversification, both geographically and in terms of companies and platforms.
- Over the years, how has your experience with Robocash evolved?
- Originally, I included Robocash because I appreciated its business model as a platform backed by an international financial group, which allowed me to invest alongside the group and benefit from their growth. Robocash helped boost my portfolio since I could secure high rates over long periods (up to 14% over 3 years). Today, I still have some investments earning 13% excluding bonuses that I made in 2022.
But now, after the significant drop in offered rates, I use my Robocash account more like a bank account where I can keep part of my capital highly liquid. I know that if needed, I can liquidate my five-figure investment in just a few hours, which very few platforms can offer.
- How do you see the future of P2P lending and crowdfunding looking ahead five years?
- Before discussing the future, let me briefly touch on the past, because we always talk about the future of P2P lending but forget that this is an asset class that has existed for over 20 years. I sometimes hear the term "exotic" used to describe this type of investment, even though P2P lending is the subject of numerous economic studies conducted by leading researchers in specialized journals - though this is more common in Asia, where they have a more constructive approach to peer-to-peer models given the microfinance needs of their populations.
As for the future, this banking disintermediation model will continue to develop, particularly due to the many untapped geographical markets and products like vehicle leasing, for which there is strong demand. I also think that more and more platforms will offer peer-to-business lending to finance companies' development projects, given that banks no longer fulfill their role as lenders. The impact of AI on credit scoring will make these models even more robust and easily accessible for platforms, which will help sustain the P2B lending model in the long term.
Regarding real estate crowdfunding, I find that the model isn't gaining traction and is already losing momentum: it's a limited market in terms of funding volumes, it's vulnerable to crises, and the returns remain relatively limited. Its future will likely come through tokenization.
- What key takeaways or insights would you like to share with your audience about long-term investing in P2P?
- There's a lot to discuss, but I'll give three points that seem important to me.
First, for investors starting out in P2P lending, I see many who sign up for 3, 4, 5 or more platforms at the same time. Not only will they spend considerable time understanding the rules and mechanisms specific to each platform, but they'll also miss out on optimizing their cashback bonuses, which are typically time-limited after registration. It's better to properly select one or two platforms, understand how they work, optimize your cashback, adjust your settings (particularly for auto-invest), and observe patiently. There will always be time later to add a third platform that complements the first two once additional capital is available.
Second, choose based on security, returns, and liquidity, but not because a cashback is offered - that's just a bonus, not what should drive an investor's decision to allocate funds. The key is to invest according to your profile, your projects, and your risk tolerance. It's better to invest with a platform that offers moderate rates but provides liquidity and/or good guarantees rather than sky-high returns from a platform with an uncertain future.
Finally, many investors spend excessive time monitoring their investments. Beyond checking their dashboards several times a day, some even recalculate the interest generated loan by loan, create their own statistics, graphs, spreadsheets, etc. Doing this is fighting the wrong battle. That time should be spent on due diligence or increasing your capital by working more or having a side hustle, because that's where the real growth of our assets lies, not in the monthly interest payments (unless you've reached a level where you can generate substantial monthly income).
- Thank you so much, Silvère, for sharing your valuable thoughts with us. It was a pleasure hearing your story. We wish you continued success on your journey in P2P investing and blogging.
- Thank you for this interview, Anastasia and Robocash team. Your readers can follow my adventures through my newsletter if they wish.
