Do Finance has been one of the least-mentioned P2P plattforms in Europe. Yet personally its my biggest pitfall! My initial investment was around 20.000 €, mostly triggered due to the attractive bonus scheme and the good auto investment features.

When the crisis emerged in March, the payouts from Do Finance were frozen for weeks. I was in constant fear of losing all of my money, especially with the frauds of Grupeer, Envestio and Kuetzal coming up.

Who is Do Finance ?

Do Finance is a Latvian P2P Plattform and part of the  Alfa Finance Group. The Plattform was launched in 2018 and loans markets are located in Polen and Indonesia.

COVID19 & Do Finance:

By end oft March disussions in several boards came up, describing delayed payout processing on Do Finance. I had requested a withdrawal on 19.03.2020 which was not processed for 1,5 weeks and I was already a bit nervous. Between 30.03 – 10.04. a series of Webcast were held and Do Finance promised to process payouts in batches.

Back then I had very limited hopes to see my money again, especially with Kuetzal and Envestio around. Nevertheless in April the first batch appeared on my account and 3 more followed till end of May.

Meanwhile Do Finance posted regular updates on their blog https://blog.dofinance.eu/ . However in May and June no new loans were issued in Poland and Indonesia. For me it looked like they are winding down the business.

Although loan issuing in Poland has not been resumed, operations in Indonesia are ramped up again. According to their last update operations will return full in September.

My Experience:

As mentioned my initial investment was around 20k €, meanwhile interest of 2,628.30 was accumulated.

My current portfolio on Dofinance looks like this. I was able to withdraw about the half of my Investments.

As you can see most of my investments are in status closed. This status was introduced after 28.03.2020. These loans have reached the end date, but invested funds are not transferred to your Account. According to the Do Finance FAQ :

The Buyback:

“These loans will be paid by respective borrowers according to their repayment dates or extended according to the loan agreement conditions. Therefore the system treats your investments as active and all investments are still under “My investment” programs.Upon receiving amounts for repaid loans from Loan Originators, DoFinance will increase the Investor’s account “Your Available Funds” by the respective amount. “

Hurrah! What does that mean in reality ? In July I got 585€ back, in August 539€. I can not predict how this goes on but I hope to get out of this without a big minus.

My takeaways:

Buybacks are worthless ( at least the Do Finance definition of it).”

“BuyBack is available to all investments. If loan is delinquent, the loan originator can buy back the loan from the investor by paying back the principal and accrued interest of the delinquent loan.”

Yes, if the loan originator decides not do to so! Then there is no BuyBack. Reminds me a bit of the mintos terms changes which happened recently.

Never consider P2P a passive investment:

Very often I read about P2P as great passive investment to reach financial independence. It´s not! The “invest and forget” features on Do Finance are comfortable but risky because you get out of touch with your portfolio. In the future I will only invest on plattforms, where I´m forced to manage more actively.

Sorry for the bitterness in this articel, the whole story feels for me like rollercoaster. I hope you are not invested in Do Finance.

Anyways learn from my mistakes and save your money ;-).

Regards Matt