Investly Reviews 24

The website is well-designed and user-friendly.Navigation is smooth,and information is easy to find.The layout is clean,making the overall experience very pleasant.

I've used this website and this helped me allot

It was going alright until 2024, but suddenly about 70% of my invoices are more than 30 days late. All of them except one just show "An e-mail reminder has been sent to the seller. An e-mail reminder has been sent to the buyer." as collection activity (or no activity at all). The one invoice with some activity says buyer defaulted. In theory the seller should jump in but it's not happening.

I should have noticed when most of the invoices started to be coming from just one seller, and the funding period became something crazy long like "365 days".

If you are thinking of joining this platform, don't because it doesn't look healthy.

Very happy with the performance so far. Only had 0.28 EUR loss in 3 years of using this plattform.

Others have said enough. I will just summarize my experience that after 5 years of investing I will be lucky to get out in positive figures...

unfortunately very many defaults, no recovery of funds, poor due diligence

The operation seems to have improved a lot since most of the other very critical reviews were made. There are still very serious communication issues, however. They don't appear to respond to emails from investors. Also, they appear to have all but stopped trading in UK invoices yet they are happy to allow investors deposit GBP money and have it sit in the Investly accounts. They also have some disturbing practices such as re-opening auctions which had already failed to be funded. That, in itself is not too bad. The part which is very naughty is that they re-use previous investor bids even though the "contract" has very clearly been changed without the investors having a chance to withdraw their bids. Some other troubling issues are how they finish auctions. They do not follow their published procedures. Sometimes they close the auction when the required amount is reached. Sometimes they continue to leave the auction open until the "Auction ends" time is reached. Sometimes they close the auction at random points in between the previously mentioned circumstances. There are MANY other minor troubling issues which leave me no choice but to distrust them and, as soon as I can arrange it, withdraw my money and find a more trustworthy company with a similar offering. The situation is very disappointing as I believe their platform and business plan were so promising.

The dashboard tells me that I have suffered 23€ of write offs

Further down the page I see 175€ in defaults

It tells me I am making 10% return. The true figure is more like 50% losses

Half of my loans defaulted. I contacted support since no payment has been received for more than 2 years, which confirmed that "Collection in these cases has not succeeded. The companies and guarantors are basically insolvent and there is nothing to take from them."

37% of principal was unpaid and therefore lost due to inability to enforce collection. This also shows that controls in credit risk assessment had deficiencies.

Worst experience in P2P lending companies I have ever had. Lesson learnt, buyback guarantees are a de facto standard nowadays in P2P lending.

I can't reach Investly and cannot withdraw my funds

I wanted to try out Investly because their invoice financing model looked interesting. I deposited 500 Euros to my account and set the auto invest feature on. After a day none of my funds were invested, there were no new invoices on the platform. I took a closer look and it turned out that it would take quite a lot of time to be fully invested on the platform if you also want diversification. There are simply not enough invoices on the platform to diversify your investments in a timely manner.

After that I tried to withdraw my funds from the platform and that's where the bigger problems started. My Investly account shows that I withdrawn my funds, but the money never arrived back to my bank account. I am still waiting to get my money back after 2 weeks. I wrote an email to the support after 1 week and I still waiting for an answer from them. I tried to call them but nobody picks up the phone. I am really getting nervous and I am not sure how can I get my money back at this point.

Investly is pretty. It is cool, both Baltic and British. One wants to love them. But the model is flawed. It is a primary market with not that many financing opportunities. This means that it will take months to get fully invested. Your investments will be very poorly diversified. Many invoices are short term. This increases your risk! To say that an invoice pays you 10% is an absolute lie because you are not invested for 365 days. You are running 8 times a 45 days risk! 8 times a year you are risking all your money to get 1,25% every 45 days, so that it might make 10% in the year. Out of 8 times a year you will have many late payments, if you are unlucky you will get non-payments, once you get paid your money will do nothing for days / weeks waiting for the next auction. You will never make 10% or 8% or even 6%. You will however be running full risk on your capital every time.
The model is flawed. The only way of earning some decent money would be in a secondary market (thus getting fully invested on day one because there are hundreds or thousand of investments available and being fully invested 365 days a year). As I said there is very poor diversification: ideally you should be invested in 100 or 200 different risks. In Investly, it is always the same 10 or 15 debtors. This is not diversification.
There are other platforms: some have insurance, others are secondary markets, others still have greater liquidity that makes diversification possible. Investly has none of these.
Summing up: you are not remotely fairly remunerated for the risk you are running.

Investly is the worst place to put your money for several reasons:

(i) Credit quality of receivables are poor especially the EUR denominated ones. So many invoices default / need restructuring. There are some Invoices that need to be restructured so that repayment happens over the course of the next 12 months. Just shows the extremely poor quality of buyers and sellers.
(ii) Invoice financing is dual recourse, if buyer doesn't pay, then Investly has to enforce the guarantee from the seller but this never happens in practice
(iii) Investly has a very inexperienced team. Invoice financing is quite a risky and complex business (this is exactly why Investly's peers limit such investments to high net worth individuals only) and it should be run by more professional people
(iv) The only way to build a solid invoice portfolio is to have an extremely granular and diversified portfolio with less than 1% of capital per invoice. Investly doesn't have the volume to be able to build such a granular portfolio and if you follow the principal of putting only 1% per invoice, then it will take forever to get your money invested and you will suffer from huge cash drag
(v) There are so many better platforms out there which are better managed and have better offerings in terms of both risk and reward. I really don't see any advantage for retail investors to invest in such a platform.

Good website. But once a vendor does not pay an invoice, they make very little effort to get the money, so investor lose out. They know it is not their money they are losing if they just let a vendor not pay them - so they are unnecessarily slow working to get the money back. I use many different online P2P investment services, and this one is the worst of them all. Definitely use any company online but not this one !

My experience was horrible.

I had a big default with a crash of a company...and Im waiting yet a judicial outcome.

A risk analysis must evaluate each risk according to the probability of its occurrence.

Investly didn't it this risk analysis.

What a brilliant first experience as an invoice financing client. We've been looking for a way to balance the needs of our ad-hoc web development clients - giving broader payment terms - with our own needs as a growing business of gaining fast access to monies earned.

Previously, we invoiced all clients on seven day terms. While we offer clients a way to track their spending ahead of an invoice being generated, small business owners are busy and from experience haven't time to log in and view a pending balance as it builds during a month. This led to clients receiving a bill for more than anticipated and having only one week to cover. Stress; something which we aim to avoid; not create!

Additionally, we are starting to attract more established clients to our service. When dealing with any established client with a finance / accounts team and the concept of bank runs, we have found it is typical to be met with requirements for a 30 day minimum invoice term oftentimes with preference for invoices falling due on a specific date to match up with bank runs.

Faced with this, we set out in search of an way to enable us to offer 30 day (or more) invoice terms to both growing and established clients on medium to large invoices which would allow us to access most of the funds we had earned. After being extorted by a few high street bank quotations and hounded by phone calls from 'comparison sites' acting as little more than sales lead forms for call centres, we came across Investly quite by chance on Google.

A few days after a smooth sign-up process expertly guided by Nick, we raised an invoice for a client on 39 day terms to match a desired payment date the client had requested.

We uploaded the invoice to the platform and received an email informing us that our client had been contacted (with our permission, of course) to verify the invoice was genuine and sign-off on it. Triin from Investly then emailed us directly to add a very welcome personal touch to the process, keeping updated on the 3 hour process which followed.

Once our client approved the invoice, Investly sprung into action. An auction commenced and investors on the marketplace made bids for parts of our invoice value. In under an hour, the auction was complete, and then came the incredible surprise. Triin updated us to confirm the auction had completed, and that payment was on its way. Literally minutes later my phone vibrated; my Barclays banking app informed me of a deposit landing in my account from Investly.

I'm still processing this. Today, I invoiced a client on 39 day terms, and in around 3 hours, the mainstay of the invoice - less just 4.43% - was in our account. I'm in shock. Working in eCommerce, you can pay 3-5% to take a card payment, and that will only arrive on your invoice due date.

Naturally with all of this I must say your mileage may vary - the very nature of the marketplace of investors behind Investly means that you may have a higher percentage than we experienced, but one thing I liked is that when I uploaded the invoice, Investly told us the minimum amount we would receive, and we could choose whether or not to accept the proposal.

I've already converted two more of my clients onto 30+ day invoicing this afternoon as a result of my experience. I'm so very impressed. What a brilliant invention - its about time someone challenged the banks grip on invoice finance!

Used Investly to invoice finance my deals and can honestly say the process was quick and easy to set up along with payment the same week as long as the customer approves invoice.

Also gives a good check on customers who have a bad rating which we pass on.

in £ I'd call it more or less 5*; in € it's... quite a bit lower. Significant lag on lending (lack of deal flow, too many investors, not enough invoices) but all in all it works well for short-term loans with good recovery rates on the loans. Should be my favourite place to put money but for the slowness (in €)

Would love to see them find another market to operate in as Estonia seems not to be able to provide the demand they need!

Writing this from my point of view as a lender on the Investly platform.

When everything is going smoothly this service is pretty good. Money goes in, more money comes out. What's not to like?

The problems start when an invoice isn't repaid on time. Now, as with any platform of this nature, bad debt and late repayments can and do happen. That's the risk one has to accept to get those higher returns. However, Investly seem poorly prepared for debt management, from at least a customer service point of view, and because of the poor communications it seems like they're pretty poor at enforcement and collection as well.

When an invoice is late, one would expect at least that Investly acknowledge this and inform their lenders of the remedial action that will take place, and on what date that action will happen.

The reality however is that there are several invoices on the system at approx 1-2 weeks overdue, some with no more information that they had before the due date. It's difficult to know if Investly are doing anything at all about this, and repeated prompting on Twitter and Intercom leads only to replies that the invoices will be updated "soon" - a follow-up update has only happened for one invoice.

When overdue invoices have been updated, they sometimes have new agreed due dates, and agreement to pay late penalties. Unfortunately these new due dates tend to fly past with no payment, no action, and no acknowledgement from Investly.

It doesn't seem like it would be terribly difficult to have a debt management / collections process, and for it to involve the most basic of customer service directives i.e. communicate with your customer what will happen and when. It seems that Investly can't manage this however. Poor show.

My business was looking to release some funding tied up in an invoice for the development of an app. Nick and Priit were superb throughout the process and kept me informed of progress at all stages and made it very easy and smooth. Would definitely recommend them and would use them again.

We are a small business with seasonal trade from large companies - and Investly did exactly what they said they would! We got a great deal on the invoice that was auctioned and the platform was simple and intuitive and the support from the Investly team made the whole process painless. Payment was made very swiftly and we will certainly use their services again - probably very soon!