Recovering our pending payments on Lendermarket

Both expert and novice investors are aware of the situation of the Creditstar group in terms of liquidity. Social media and rating sites are teeming with angry investors who want their pending payments back.

The situation is much better than it was a year ago, with monthly repayments, but many investors still have payments to receive. As one of them, I wanted to see if I could find a way of recovering my funds quickly.

I did just that a few days ago, recovering exactly 97.6% of my outstanding payments. In this article, I explain how I went about achieving this result, without any software or code to program, but a simple trick.

A man relieved to receive his pending payments from the Lendermarket platform

The situation on Lendermarket

All P2P platforms have their pros in terms of returns, liquidity and security, but they also have their cons. And there’s nothing worse for investors than to find themselves unable to withdraw the funds they have invested, when the contract authorises them to do so.

As a result of a significant decrease in investments on Mintos following the war in Ukraine, Creditstar found itself having to make large volumes of payments when these would simply have been reinvested by investors under normal circumstances.

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This was followed by a liquidity crisis for Creditstar, which came on top of the geopolitical situation in Europe, prompting investors to withdraw their funds. For a group like Creditstar, which was in an ‘aggressive’ development phase, this news caused the machine to seize up.

So I wanted to test their system and their level of liquidity to see if I could speed up the process and release some of my funds. My intuition was to take advantage of the fact that two versions of the Lendermarket platforms coexist and interact.

Prior notice

This is not an rocket science, and what may work at one time may not work later. Many will have noticed that Lendermarket’s mechanisms are sometimes not logical, so it’s not surprising if the platform doesn’t do what is expected of it.

Furthermore, without knowing their level of liquidity, it is difficult to predict whether their internal mechanisms will allow major capital outflows. If Lendermarket had 100% of its funds at its disposal, all pending payments would already have been repaid.

Finally, as we’ll see at the end, we’ve already received some feedback. This system seems to have worked for some but not for others. But as I don’t have direct access to their dashboard, it’s hard to know why. Here I am sharing what I’ve done, so it’s up to you to do as you see fit.

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Step 1 : Activate Auto-Invest (v2)

On 10 July, my account had a total value of €3,481.42. Of this total, I had €2,834.13 in pending payments (81.4%) and the remaining €647.29 was invested (I’m a long-term investor, so this is quite normal).

A simple action: make Lendermarket believe that I was going to save them money. In fact, as well as being bad publicity for Lendermarket, pending payments are remunerated at 18%.

However, the loans available for investment on Lendermarket v2 are at 16 or 17%, or even less. So I had to make Lendermarket understand that I wanted to migrate my funds from pending payments on v1 to investments on v2.

Here are the criteria of this portfolio:

  • Portfolio size: €3,000
  • Maximum investment / loan: €100
  • Term: 30 to 750 days
  • Companies: Creditstar (Czech Republic, Finland, Denmark, Sweden), Monefit Estonia, Rapidos, Credifiel.

In this way, the Lendermarket platform now considered me to be an investor who wanted to reinvest his funds with them once my pending payments had been received.

Auto-invest portfolio on Lendermarket

Step 2: Watch for the funds transfer (v1)

In concrete terms, at this stage I wasn’t expecting much, thinking that either nothing would happen or Lendermarket would find a way of transferring my funds from v1 to v2 and then reinvesting them straight away without me having time to do anything.

On top of that, I wasn’t expecting anything to happen quickly. Lendermarket’s payments only appear on Tuesdays. In practice, I thought that if anything happened, it would take a week.

Following the creation and activation of my auto-invest portfolio on v2 on Wednesday 10 July, Lendermarket transferred some of my pending payments to the ‘funds available’ status of v1 on Friday 12 July.

Note that in the image below, the available funds are on the v1 platform (I only have the screenshot of the total portfolio). They have therefore not yet switched to v2 and so cannot be reinvested by Lendermarket at this stage (impossible in v1).

Available balance on Lendermarket

Why didn’t I receive 100% of my pending payments, but ‘only’ 97.6%?

My guess is as follows: I noticed that the €68.28 that wasn’t transferred was from June, which suggests that Lendermarket’s algorithm includes a limit on pending payments that are too recent, so as not to affect its liquidity too much.

Step 3: Stop auto-invest (v2)

From there, I waited for these available funds to move to ‘pending transfers’ status on v1. This is an automatic process that consists of transferring our available funds from v1 to v2 as soon as they appear.

The process of migrating our funds from v1 to v2 takes several hours. But I didn’t wait until the end of this process, because as soon as the €2,765.85 went into ‘pending transfers’, I deactivated my portfolio on v2.

It must surely be possible to deactivate the auto-investment portfolio in v2 as soon as the funds appear as available in v1 (and therefore before they go into ‘pending transfers’ status) but I wanted to do as much as I could to make sure everything worked.

Then I had to wait for the money to migrate to v2 as ‘available funds’. Investors who receive payments every month know that this process takes all night. And indeed, my funds arrived on Saturday 13 July.

Available balance on v2 of Lendermarket platform

Step 4: Payment request

At this stage, the money is now available on v2 of the Lendermarket platform without any auto-invest portfolio being activated. I immediately requested payment of the funds, which then changed to ‘’pending withdrawal‘’ status.

Pending withdrawal

Given that the following day was a Sunday (14 July), I wasn’t expecting anything. Then, Monday 15 July was a long day.

And all afternoon, nothing….

Nothing.

Until 7.47pm (2.57pm in Europe).

My N26 account shows that I’ve received my money.

Payment received from Lendermarket

This is an important point that will also clarify matters for investors who think that Lendermarket does not pay interest on late payments. With the successful case study of the last few days, I can confirm that the platform does indeed pay everything it owes into our account.

However, in my case, all of these elements were only displayed once the funds had been made available in v1. It’s really silly to proceed in this way, as it gives the impression that Lendermarket is not respecting its contractual obligations.

In fact, it was only once the funds were made available that the calculations were displayed, even though they included data dating back several months. Here are the figures that appeared all at once on 12 July (see dates shown):

Investor account on Lendermarket

The amount paid is now shown (to the nearest 0.01 due to rounding) and my total Lendermarket account now shows a total of €715.57, including €68.28 in pending payments (9.5%).

Now you know everything.

EDIT: On Tuesday, the investors’ payment day, Lendermarket paid me the €68.28, so I now have €0 in outstanding payments.

Portfolio of Just-P2P after pending payments done

Can everybody get their money back?

I have no clue.

I can’t guarantee that this process will work for everyone because I don’t know what’s going on in the internal mechanics of the platform. For the moment, I’m getting quite different feedback from the investment community.

First of all, it has worked for some, like Laurent, who had an account worth more than €72K and was able to release more than €30K out of €41K of pending payments (Creditstar, of course, and mainly in Sweden, the Czech Republic and Denmark).

Laurent portfolio

In fact, Laurent did the same thing as me, but a few days earlier on the recommendation of Lendermarket support, who advised reactivating auto-invest on the 24-month Denmark at 17% on v2, which would allow some of the pending payments to be transferred.

Recommendation to activate pending payments

Laurent’s strategy now is to wait for a cashback campaign from Lendermarket to reinvest some of his funds, as he likes their returns even though he understands that their pending payments can be scary.

This method also worked with Arnaud, who had over €13K in his account and activated his automated investment portfolio on the morning of 22 July. By the afternoon, he had received more than €6K and immediately deactivated auto-investment on v2.

Arnaud portfolio on Lendermarket indicating pending payments

Arnaud, with whom I’m in contact on Twitter, told me that he was going to redirect this new money to either Esketit or Debitum (very good choices) but that he would leave the rest, i.e. €7,000, to work on Lendermarket:

Communication was rubbish, but I think cash flow problems happen to everyone.

Another example is that of Johan and another Laurent with similar experiences. In both cases, activating auto-invest on v2 unlocked the pending payments on v1, but they were surprised by the ‘speed’ of the transfer from v1 to v2, which lasted only a few hours.

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Johan created a 1,000€ auto-invest portfolio on 16 July. He checked every day to see if the funds appeared, the last time being at 8am on 20 July. Except that Johan didn’t check his Lendermarket account until 5 hours later, at 1pm.

He then noted that Lendermarket had released €1109 in pending payments, which had been released out of a total of 8.3K€. But it was too late, because in the meantime the funds had been released and migrated to v2 for reinvestment.

The screenshot shows the 1,000€ reinvested and the €109 pending withdrawal.

Johan portfolio

Two very interesting conclusions can be drawn from Johan’s experience, which may be useful to other investors:

  • As explained in step 2 of the method described above, it is important to check the status of our portfolio every hour. Lendermarket HAS LIQUIDITY and can therefore make it available and transfer it within a few hours.
  • Another important point discovered with Johan’s test: he released a little more than the maximum amount set in his auto-invest but … not much more. So I suppose there’s a correlation between the value of the auto-invest portfolio and what you receive in available funds.

Laurent ‘2’ was able to release 99% of his pending payments, i.e. 1,047€. But here too, the investor looked at the account on the morning of Saturday 20 July, and then only on the morning of Sunday 21 July. In 24 hours, his funds had therefore been reinvested to the rate of 17%.

He also carried out the manipulation on 16 July by programming an auto-invest portfolio worth 30K€. But strangely, he only received 1.5K€ in pending payments, about the same amount as investors with smaller amounts invested.

Max portfolio

More surprisingly, Max explained to me that he had checked every hour but the migration from v1 to v2, and then the automated reinvestment, apparently happened too quickly for him to be able to stop auto-investing in v2 once the funds had been released in v1.

Finally, Adham is the biggest investor I know on Lendermarket, with a total of 150K invested on Lendermarket…., all of which is in pending payments. Now Adham is certainly the most zen of all the investors I’ve interviewed. 😎

His approach is different, as he does NOT wish to withdraw his funds but prefers to let them work at 18%. Nonetheless, Adham remains very vigilant, as he is in contact with lawyers to send a formal notice of default and prepare the follow-up if he needs to go further.

Below are Adham’s portfolios (v1 and v2):

Adham portfolio on Lendermarket v1
Adham portfolio on Lendermarket v2

That’s it for this feedback. A big thank you to all the investors who shared theirs with me, especially Max, Johan, Adham and the two Laurent! And a big thank you to them for sharing their investment portfolios.

In addition to the method explained, this shows that the situation is gradually recovering, that Creditstar has the firm intention of honouring all its obligations, including remunerating outstanding payments at 18%, and that the Group is recovering from this liquidity crisis.

For my part, I enjoyed talking to all those investors who proved that in this type of situation, it’s better to manage things with reason rather than with emotions, which can do no good.

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