What is Maclear?
Maclear is a P2P lending platform for business loans, operated since 2023 by Maclear AG, a company registered in Wallisellen near Zurich. The company is older than the platform. It was Maclear SA, a software company in Sion, which Maclear’s founders, Denis Ustjev and Aleksandr Lang, took over in 2020 and moved to Herisau as Maclear AG, per the Swiss commercial register and Maclear’s own about page. Investors had put €157 million into Maclear’s projects by September 2026, per Maclear’s monthly update.
The word doing the heavy lifting in Maclear’s marketing is “Swiss”, for its company, its law and its supervision. In this review I measure what that word covers, and by Maclear’s own contracts and the Swiss register, it covers much less than it suggests.
How does Maclear work?
Maclear lends to each borrower itself and sells you part of that loan. The loan agreement is between Maclear and the borrower, and you buy your part of the claim from Maclear under a claim purchase and assignment agreement made for each investment. There is no direct contract between you and the borrower, and Maclear’s terms keep the two of you anonymous to each other.
The borrower repays Maclear, which passes the payments on to you once it has received them, on each project’s own schedule. Money can’t wait on the platform, because deposits you don’t invest within 30 days go back to your bank account.
No buyback stands behind the loans. What protects you if a borrower stops paying is the borrower’s collateral, which Maclear holds and enforces for investors, and a reserve fund filled with 2% of each funded project.
The platform earns a success fee from each borrower whose project is funded, at a rate its terms leave to each project.
What you can invest in
Maclear offers one kind of investment, a share of a loan to a company, from €50 a project. On 2 November 2026, Maclear’s promotional page showed three business loans of 14 months and a 9-month project called “Consumer Loans”, and Maclear’s monthly updates list the lenders it funds under the industry “Loan Originator”. What you own is part of the loan claim, bought from Maclear, not a security.
The projects anyone can see aren’t the whole market. Private projects open only to investors whose portfolio reaches €2,500, and in August 2026 Maclear’s account pages listed loans backed by bitcoin as “coming soon” for portfolios of €50,000 or more. On the secondary market you can buy existing investments from €30.
What return can you expect on Maclear?
While Maclear’s promotional page advertises returns of “up to 16.5%” a year, the median Maclear investor on P2P Dash has earned 23.8% a year including Maclear’s bonuses, across 293 portfolios, as of November 2026. Most of the difference is the bonuses Maclear pays on top of interest. In 2024, by its own accounts, Maclear paid investors CHF 530,266 of interest and CHF 297,583 of bonuses, while borrowers paid it CHF 464,322 of interest, and it covered the gap from its fees. Maclear’s rates hold so far, but part of what investors earned in 2024 came from Maclear, not from the borrowers.
Maclear’s projects offered 14.7–15.7% in November 2026, before bonuses, and money paid in by SEPA transfer loses nothing to fees or withheld tax. Money waiting for a project earns nothing, and Maclear sends back deposits you haven’t invested within 30 days. Maclear publishes no default rate, and the one default it reports returned the principal, by Maclear’s account, through a private settlement, so no figure Maclear publishes shows what a failed loan costs you.
Maclear’s loyalty bonus adds 1.5–3% to the rate on larger portfolios, one of five bonus programmes on the Maclear bonus page. If a borrower repays early, Maclear’s terms still pay you at least three months of interest.
Maclear is tied for the highest Returns score of the 21 platforms I’ve reviewed, 5.0 out of 5. The score rests on what investors kept last year and this year, not on advertised rates and not on the risk of losing money, which Is Maclear safe? covers.
Is Maclear safe?
Maclear protects your money against a late borrower with collateral and a reserve fund, but not against a failure of Maclear itself, whose terms say investor funds aren’t privileged in its bankruptcy. No buyback obligation stands behind the loans, so a borrower’s default falls on your money until the collateral is sold. No financial supervisor licenses Maclear, and no compensation scheme covers your money. Your cash sits in Maclear AG’s own name, and the company carries the loans on its own balance sheet in its 2024 accounts, which show negative equity at the end of 2023 and 2024. Maclear AG has had no statutory auditor registered since January 2026. In September 2026 a third of Maclear’s new lending went to one young Bulgarian lender. Maclear publishes no default rate, and the one default it reports was settled privately. The risk in the assets you hold remains fully yours.
Maclear is tied for the lowest Safety score of the 21 platforms I’ve reviewed, 1.0 out of 5. The score rests mostly on how Maclear is built, with no licence, investor funds its terms leave unprotected in its bankruptcy, an operator with negative equity and no registered statutory auditor, and a third of each month’s new lending from July to September 2026 going to one young Bulgarian lender, and partly on a record of one default that no independent source shows tested. A bankruptcy protection that a Maclear blog post claims and its terms disclaim also counts against it, and so does a promotional page that answers “Yes” when asked whether Maclear is regulated.
Is Maclear regulated?
No, Maclear isn’t licensed by any financial supervisor for the investment service it offers. Its Swiss supervision is a membership in PolyReg, a self-regulatory organisation that supervises Maclear AG’s duties under Swiss anti-money-laundering law, which covers whose money comes in and from where, not how borrowers are chosen or loans recovered. None of FINMA’s lists of authorised institutions includes Maclear AG as of November 2026, and the terms say Maclear “is not supervised by the Swiss Financial Market Authority FINMA directly”.
Asked “Is Maclear regulated?”, the promotional page answers “Yes”, and a post on Maclear’s blog calls it “a platform already regulated in Switzerland” that can operate without an EU crowdfunding licence. The company’s own anti-money-laundering policy states that “THE SERVICES DO NOT QUALIFY AS FINANCIAL SERVICES” under Swiss law. The “Yes” rests on a membership that supervises money-laundering checks, not your investment.
Spain’s securities regulator, the CNMV, warned in May 2026 that Maclear isn’t authorised to offer crowdlending, and Belgium’s FSMA republished the warning. Latvijas Banka, Latvia’s central bank and financial supervisor, lists “Maclear AG” among companies providing financial services that require a licence without one, in a warning updated on 21 September 2026, and says money invested with these companies isn’t protected under Latvia’s investor protection law.
What happens if Maclear fails?
Your uninvested cash on Maclear isn’t protected if Maclear itself fails, because its terms say investor funds “are not privileged in case of bankruptcy of Maclear”. The same section describes “a separate escrow account” that is “protected from unforeseen circumstances that may happen to Maclear”, then adds that no deposit insurance covers it and that you accept a risk of complete loss.
Your cash sits in accounts in Maclear AG’s own name. On 20 October 2026, my account’s deposit page sent transfers by default to a BVNK account in Maclear AG’s name, with a London IBAN whose bank code belongs to Banking Circle, and offered Narvi, a Finnish e-money institution, as the alternative.
Who owns the loans in a bankruptcy is less clear. The help centre says “The loan claims belong to investors, not to Maclear”, and the terms say each investment buys part of the loan from Maclear. The 2024 accounts carry CHF 9.3 million of loans and interest on Maclear’s own balance sheet against CHF 9.2 million owed to investors, and their notes describe “a credit brokerage business for its own account”. In June 2026 Maclear’s CFO wrote to investors that “behind your investments stands the platform itself” and that Maclear “takes on the credit risk of individual late payments by borrowers”. The assignment agreement that decides it is created with each investment and isn’t published. The platform’s own documents point both ways on whether the loans you fund are yours or Maclear’s.
A Maclear blog post says Swiss agency law keeps the assets Maclear holds for clients, “including loan claims”, out of its bankruptcy estate. The terms you accept say investor funds aren’t privileged. Claiming a protection that the contract disclaims counts against Maclear’s Safety score.
Maclear AG’s 2024 accounts, published in June 2026, show negative equity of CHF 87,026 at the end of 2024, after CHF 19,085 a year earlier, and a 2023 loss larger than that year’s revenue. Their notes say “there is therefore a considerable risk that some of the company’s assets cannot be repaid”. Of Maclear AG’s CHF 272,360 share capital, CHF 172,360 came from turning debts into shares in 2023 and 2024, per the Swiss register. That is the balance sheet behind the terms’ promise that Maclear is liable with its business assets.
The 2024 accounts carry no auditor’s report. The company waived audits from 2010 until 2023, then appointed blueAUDIT GmbH as its statutory auditor, and the Swiss register recorded blueAUDIT’s exit on 29 January 2026, with no successor registered by 30 October 2026. By the company’s own account, the 2024 accounts went out in “pre-audit form”, and the company won’t name the auditor it says is checking them, while its promotional page says “The platform is audited by Grant Thornton”.
Borrowers
Maclear lends to companies directly, and in September 2026 it funded 16 projects with €13.1 million of investors’ money, per its monthly update. ULTIMA FINANCE, a Bulgarian lender registered as a company in October 2025 and with Bulgaria’s central bank in March 2026, took 33.7% of that money. It was the largest borrower in July and August too, and over the quarter it took about €13.3 million, 35% of Maclear’s lending. Borrowers Maclear lists under the industry “Loan Originator” took 39.5% of September’s lending, and borrowers in Bulgaria 60.9%. These are shares of each month’s new lending, not of all the money outstanding.
The terms say “Borrowers are not allowed to operate in the interest differential business”, which in plain words means lending money on at a margin. Maclear’s largest borrower of 2025, with 14.8% of the year’s €52.8 million, was PRIMA FINANCE GROUP AD, a Bulgarian lender that lends to businesses at 2.7–3.6% a month, per its project file. PRIMA is in the Bulgarian National Bank’s register of financial institutions, as I found in August 2026, and Maclear graded it AA with a 9/10 credit history about 14 months after it was registered, where an affiliate reviewer’s analysis puts it at B+. The terms rule out the kind of borrower that took the largest share of investors’ money in 2025 and in each month from July to September 2026.
The Bulgarian registers tie ULTIMA to PRIMA. ULTIMA’s owner, INDUSTRY POPOV AD, pledged its whole business to PRIMA in December 2025 to secure a €1 million loan, and ULTIMA, PRIMA and a third registered lender, AVECREDIT, share a correspondence address in Lozen and one contact person. AVECREDIT’s manager sits on PRIMA’s board, and its owner, SIMAO-RT, is itself a Maclear borrower. None of the entries links these companies to Maclear’s owners. The shares Maclear publishes count each of them alone.
When I looked up three Estonian borrowers of earlier projects in the Estonian business register on 26 August 2026, two had changed their names since borrowing. One had no turnover so far in 2026 and lost its VAT number in March 2026, and the other had negative equity in both 2024 and 2025.
Collateral
Maclear’s loans are secured by collateral that borrowers pledge, which Maclear holds as “the holder of collaterals” and enforces for investors. If a borrower is more than 3 days late, Maclear keeps paying your interest from its reserve fund. After 30 days it starts collecting, and after 60 days it goes to court and enforces the collateral. Whatever it recovers is shared among the investors in proportion, and the debt-collection agreement on my account pays out finally only once all the collateral has been sold.
The collateral doesn’t always cover the loan. A BBB-graded project I read in August 2026 sought a loan of 118% of its collateral’s value, as the platform’s own page stated, and Maclear’s auto-invest lets you choose loans of up to 200% of their collateral’s value.
The reserve fund is filled with 2% of each funded project, and Maclear’s terms say it “cannot guarantee full payment of interest or full repayment of the principal” and “is not an insurance scheme”. The help centre says the fund is “held in a segregated bank account and audited by Grant Thornton AG”. The 2024 accounts, which carry no auditor’s report, show the 2% only as a provision of CHF 195,049 against bad debts, with no separate fund among the assets. In Maclear’s 2024 accounts, the fund it calls segregated and audited shows up as an unaudited provision.
The terms promise, narrow and then exclude Maclear’s own liability. They say “Maclear itself is liable with the business assets for defaulting payments”, then that covering investors “can finally be done only through enforced realization of all collaterals”, and then exclude Maclear’s liability for “LOSS OF ANY INVESTED AMOUNTS”.
Defaults and recovery
Maclear reports one default in its lending history, a €150,000 loan to Vibroedil S.R.L., an Italian company that entered liquidation on 22 July 2025. All the principal came back within about two and a half months, Maclear says, through a private settlement with Vibroedil’s owner under personal guarantees he had given, and nothing was taken from the reserve fund.
The money came from the owner, not from selling collateral, so the collateral enforcement Maclear describes has never been run on a loan, and the help centre says the reserve fund has never been used. Maclear publishes no default rate, only a count of “1/0 default / late loans” on its homepage in June and August 2026, and its statistics page showed no default figures when I captured it on 21 August 2026. A record of one default, settled privately, tests none of the protections Maclear markets.
In a letter to investors in June 2026, Maclear’s CFO wrote that “the platform has not encountered defaults on the loans issued”, ten months after Vibroedil entered liquidation. The company itself calls the Vibroedil case “one default in its lending history”.
Conflicts of interest
Maclear has five conflicts of interest with its investors, set out in its terms, its fees, its ties to 8lends and its marketing.
- Maclear can change its terms by posting them. The terms “take effect when posted”, and between 6 and 12 February 2026 the public terms changed under the same “4th of April 2024” date, with the minimum investment cut from €500 to €50 and the top rate raised from 12% to 16.5%. My account’s copy, downloaded in August 2026, still carried the earlier text, so the date on the terms doesn’t tell you which text you accepted. The deposit and debt-collection agreements on my account also declare their own “terms and existence” confidential. You can close your account only once none of your money is in a project.
- Maclear is paid by the borrowers it selects and grades. Each borrower pays Maclear a success fee when its project is funded, at a rate the terms leave to the project. In 2024 that fee and consulting line, CHF 758,222, was Maclear’s main income, and it paid the bonuses that topped up investors’ interest.
- Maclear alone decides how a late loan is enforced. Under the debt-collection agreement, investors can’t enforce their claims themselves, and Maclear can extend or defer a loan at its own discretion.
- Maclear AG also works for 8lends, a crypto-lending platform its founders built. Maclear’s help centre says 8lends shares Maclear’s founders and senior team and that Maclear AG is its collateral agent. 8lends’ terms in force from January to June 2026 called Maclear AG the parent company of 8lends’ operator, and those in force from July 2026 call Maclear AG an independent service provider. The logged-in pages link to 8lends, and bonus points earned on Maclear converted into 8lends tokens until the exchange was paused on 29 October 2026.
- Maclear’s own tag container links maclear.ch with CrowdIndex, the review site that ranked Maclear first in Europe in August 2026. The payment is disclosed: CrowdIndex’s press page calls Maclear “a paying commercial partner” and says “These rankings are not independent.” What a paid partnership doesn’t explain is that Maclear’s container tracks visitors across maclear.ch and crowdindex.org in one Google Analytics property, whose settings list Maclear’s own domains. CrowdIndex’s links to Maclear and 8lends also carry the same
tr= campaign parameter Maclear’s own site uses, not the tracking links Maclear’s affiliate program issues. Maclear says CrowdIndex is one of many external partners in its affiliate programmes, with no ownership or operational ties, and that the shared tag is its own traffic tag.
How do you use Maclear?
You use Maclear in five steps, from signing up to choosing how your money is invested.
- Sign up and verify your identity with Sumsub, using an ID document and a photo of your face.
- Confirm your phone number to see the projects, and your address to open the deposit page.
- Sign Form A, the beneficial-owner declaration Swiss anti-money-laundering rules require, which Maclear asks for before auto-invest opens.
- Deposit at least €50 in euros by SEPA transfer from a bank account in your own name.
- Invest within 30 days, by hand in a project from €50 or with an auto-invest strategy you set.
Maclear is tied for the fifth-highest Usability score of the 21 platforms I’ve reviewed, 3.5 out of 5. The score rests on an account statement page with a tab for tax whose contents aren’t on record, on support that no contact of mine has tested, and on Maclear’s auto-invest, which filters projects by rate, term, risk grade, country, project type, debt ratio and loan-to-value.
Opening an account
Maclear verifies your identity through Sumsub before you can add money. I registered on 23 October 2023, and my account was verified fifteen minutes after its activation email. In August 2026 Maclear asked for my phone number before showing its investments and for proof of address before opening the deposit page, and approved each within minutes. Onboarding asks nothing about your investing knowledge or the losses you can bear. Its checks are the anti-money-laundering ones.
Form A, the beneficial-owner declaration, sat unsigned in my account from October 2023 until 2026, three years on a fully verified account. Auto-invest wouldn’t open until I signed it, which is the right behaviour, arriving late. The signed copy carries the date the form was prefilled, 23 October 2023, not the day I signed it.
Deposits
Depositing on Maclear is free by SEPA transfer, in euros only, from €50. The transfer must come from a bank account in your own name, and Maclear’s deposit page said on 20 October 2026 that SEPA transfers normally arrive within 1–2 working days. The money goes to an account in Maclear AG’s name, and each investor can also get a personal virtual IBAN for SEPA Instant deposits.
Auto-invest
Maclear has one kind of auto-invest, a strategy you set yourself. A strategy sets an amount per project from €50 and filters projects by rate, term, Maclear’s risk grade, credit history, country and project type, by the borrower’s debt-to-equity ratio and by loan-to-value up to 200%. It can skip projects you already hold or invest more than once in one project. I looked through the form on 20 October 2026, without setting up a strategy. A limit per project leaves no limit per borrower, and Maclear’s largest borrowers raise money through one project after another.
Support
Maclear’s support is reached by email at support@maclear.ch, per its account pages in October 2026, a channel no support contact of mine has tested. A help centre on its website sets out the platform’s rules.
How fast can you get your money out of Maclear?
You can withdraw cash from Maclear within one business day, free from €50, per Maclear’s withdrawal page. Invested money comes back as each project repays, or earlier on the secondary market for a 2.5% fee, as long as the project is paying on schedule. Money in a project in default can’t be sold and waits on recovery.
Maclear is tied for the second-highest Liquidity score of the 21 platforms I’ve reviewed, 3.5 out of 5. The score rests on Maclear’s published terms, since my account has held no money, with free withdrawals and a working secondary market weighed against an exit that closes once a project defaults.
Withdrawals
Maclear withdrawals are free from €50 and arrive within one business day, per Maclear’s withdrawal page, a promise no withdrawal of mine has tested. The withdrawal page sets a €50 minimum, though the deposit agreement still allows a handling fee of up to €10 below €50. Withdrawals go only to the bank account you verified, and if Maclear asks for new account details and you don’t give them within 30 days, its terms say Maclear “may be required to dispose of the funds”, and you forfeit “any claims against Maclear” for them.
Cash can’t wait on Maclear. Deposits must be invested within 30 days, and repayments withdrawn within 60 days or reinvested within 30, or Maclear sends the money back. The deposit agreement ties the rule to Swiss banking law, under which balances settled within 60 days don’t count as deposits, so Maclear can hold client money without a banking licence.
Secondary market
The Maclear secondary market is where you sell your project investments to other Maclear investors before they mature, for a 2.5% fee on each completed sale, paid by the seller. You can list at face value or up to 50% below it, never above, for €30 or more, and a listing expires after 14 days, per Maclear’s help centre. Investments from a bonus can’t be listed, and neither can a project in default or behind on its repayments. The exit works for the projects that are paying and closes for the ones you’d most want to leave.
On 21 August 2026 the market held 1,250 listings across 42 pages, at face value or up to 3.6% below it, with working buy buttons. Those listings were what hadn’t sold yet that day. By Maclear’s own count, €16.26 million changed hands in 65,079 sales from May 2024, with a median of about three hours to sell, and every listing from June 2025 to March 2026 found a buyer.
Closing your account
You can close your Maclear account by asking its support team, once none of your money is in a project, all your loans are repaid and no loan inquiry is open. The terms set no notice period or payout time, and say “Any losses resulting from the termination of the contract shall be borne by the User.” If Maclear ends the agreement itself, it decides “in its reasonable discretion” whether your claim assignments continue.
What fees does Maclear charge?
Maclear charges no fee to deposit by SEPA transfer, invest in a project or withdraw €50 or more. Selling on the secondary market is the one charge you choose, and nothing is charged for leaving money idle, though Maclear sends back deposits you haven’t invested within 30 days.
Maclear fees and costs | Deposit fee | Free by SEPA bank transfer in EUR, own-name account · minimum €50 |
| Investment fee | Free |
| Early exit fee | 2.5% secondary market fee, paid by the seller when a sale completes |
| Withdrawal fee | Free from €50 · up to €10 handling fee below €50 |
| Currency conversion | EUR-only platform |
| Inactivity fee | Free deposits must be invested within 30 days or are returned |
| Withholding tax | 0% the platform withholds nothing, you declare the interest yourself |
The platform earns from borrowers instead, through a success fee on each funded project.
Pros and cons
What Maclear does well
- Investments in projects that pay on schedule can be sold early on Maclear's secondary market. Sellers can price a listing at face value or up to 50% below it, and pay a 2.5% fee only when the sale completes. On 21 August 2026 the market held 1,250 listings.
- Maclear charges no fee to deposit by SEPA transfer, invest in a project or withdraw €50 or more. Maclear's withdrawal page sets a €50 minimum. The deposit agreement allows a handling fee of up to €10 only on withdrawals below €50.
- Maclear's terms pay you at least three months of interest when a borrower repays early. The terms say this holds "even if the Borrower repays the loan sooner".
Where Maclear disappoints
- Maclear AG owed more than it owned at the end of both 2023 and 2024, by its own accounts. Its negative equity grew from CHF 19,085 to CHF 87,026, and the 2024 accounts carry no auditor's report. No statutory auditor has been registered since January 2026.
- Maclear's own terms say investor funds aren't privileged if Maclear goes bankrupt. The same terms describe a separate escrow account "protected from unforeseen circumstances". A Maclear blog post claims Swiss law keeps investors' assets out of a Maclear bankruptcy, which the terms disclaim.
- No financial supervisor licenses Maclear's investment service. Maclear's Swiss supervision is a membership in PolyReg, a self-regulatory organisation for anti-money-laundering duties. No compensation scheme covers your money. Spain's CNMV warned in May 2026 that Maclear isn't authorised for crowdlending.
- Maclear's lending from July to September 2026 leaned on one young Bulgarian lender, a kind of borrower its terms bar. ULTIMA FINANCE, registered with Bulgaria's central bank in March 2026, took 33.7% of September's new lending, per Maclear. ULTIMA's owner pledged its whole business to PRIMA FINANCE GROUP, Maclear's largest borrower of 2025, to secure a €1 million loan, per the Bulgarian registers.
Who should use Maclear?
Maclear suits, in my assessment, only investors who put in money they can afford to lose in full.
Maclear suits:
- A small, speculative position you can afford to lose in full, including in a Maclear bankruptcy
- Investors who want to sell paying projects early, through a secondary market with published rules
- Investors who have read the terms’ bankruptcy clause and accept it
Avoid Maclear if you are:
- Relying on Maclear itself to keep your money safe, because its terms say investor funds aren’t privileged in its bankruptcy and the company had negative equity at the end of 2023 and 2024
- Counting on Swiss regulation, because Maclear’s Swiss supervision covers anti-money-laundering checks only
- Expecting audited accounts behind the platform, because Maclear has had no statutory auditor registered since January 2026
- Wanting your money spread across unrelated borrowers, because a third of Maclear’s new lending from July to September 2026 went to one Bulgarian lender that the registers tie to Maclear’s largest borrower of 2025
- Taking online rankings of Maclear as independent, because the site that ranked it first in Europe is paid by Maclear
