Afranga Review - A Real ECSP Licence Around a Largely Self-Owned Loan Book

Bulgarian crowdlending platform that relaunched in March 2025 under a full European Crowdfunding Service Provider licence, replacing an older buyback-based product. The licence is genuine and was verified on the regulator’s own records. The problem sits one layer down: by Afranga’s own published figures, roughly 96% of the money investors have placed through the platform has gone to lending companies controlled by Afranga’s sole owner and his two business partners, and the platform’s public pages no longer say so.

What is Afranga in 60 seconds

Afranga is a Bulgarian platform where you lend money to lending companies rather than to their end borrowers. You pick a loan on the marketplace, or you park money in a fixed-term product called SaveSmart, and the lending company pays you interest out of what it collects from its own consumer or car-loan customers. Afranga holds an ECSP licence, which is the EU-wide crowdfunding authorisation created by Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 and issued here by Bulgaria’s Financial Supervision Commission. That licence brings conduct rules, a four-day reflection period for retail investors and segregated client money at a licensed payment institution. It does not bring any compensation scheme, and it does not make the loans safe. There is no buyback guarantee: if a lending company fails to pay, Afranga says it will negotiate and may start legal action, and that is the whole of your protection.

Strengths

• The ECSP licence is real and independently verifiable. Afranga EOOD was authorised by Bulgaria’s Financial Supervision Commission on 12 September 2023 (Resolution 863-DUKF), with the scope extended on 19 March 2025 to cover payment services through a third-party provider. The authorisation is visible outside Bulgaria as well: the Bank of Lithuania lists Afranga EOOD as a passported crowdfunding provider, and France’s AMF carries Afranga EOOD on its white list of authorised cross-border providers (entry dated 23 March 2026). This is a materially better regulatory position than the platform had before March 2025, when it ran as a trademark of the lender with no financial-services authorisation of its own.

• Client money sits outside the platform. Investor funds are held at Lemonway, an electronic money institution licensed by the French ACPR under number 16568, in accounts in the investor’s own name. Afranga acts as a registered agent. That structure means an Afranga insolvency does not by itself put uninvested cash on the platform’s balance sheet, which is a real, if narrow, protection.

• The anchor originator publishes audited accounts, and the audit is clean. Stik Credit AD’s FY2025 annual report is prepared under IFRS as adopted by the EU and carries an unqualified opinion from Zaharinova Nexia EOOD (audit firm reg. No. 138, signing auditor Dimitrina Zaharinova), dated 4 June 2026, with no going-concern paragraph. Afranga publishes it, along with financials for four of the six originators. Most platforms at this size publish nothing comparable. Note the flip side in the next section: three of the six originators publish unaudited figures and one publishes none at all, per re:think P2P (27.08.2026).

Things to Watch

• About 96% of investor money has gone to companies controlled by the platform’s own owner and his two partners. This is the single most important fact on the page, and it is computed from Afranga’s own originator table (fetched 01.09.2026). Of the €12.76m shown in the “invested on Afranga” column, €12.2m sits with Stikcredit (€5m), Lendivo (€4.4m) and Tiberus (€2.8m). The Bulgarian Commercial Register shows that Afranga’s sole owner Svetlin Sabev sits on Stik Credit AD’s board of directors, co-owns and co-manages Lendivo OOD, and co-owns Tiberus OOD through SN Investment EOOD, alongside Stik Credit’s two controlling shareholders Stefan Topuzakov and Kristiyan Kostadinov. Stik Credit’s own audited FY2025 report names Afranga EOOD as an affiliate party of Stik Credit. The three genuinely unrelated originators (Credirect, Lev Credit, Swiss Funds) account for roughly €557k, or about 4%. Adding originators has diversified the logo wall, not the counterparty risk.

• Afranga’s public pages no longer disclose the connection. The current About page describes a marketplace of vetted companies and does not mention Stik Credit. The originator page describes Stikcredit neutrally as one of six. A search of the General Terms and Conditions v2.0 (dated 27.08.2026) for “Stik”, “related part”, “affiliate” and “conflict of interest” returns nothing. Historically the link was open: the platform migrated from Stik Credit’s own domain, and the archived 2023 homepage carried the footer “Afranga is a trademark of Stik Credit JSC”. The disclosure disappearing while the concentration stayed is itself the finding.

• A third of the anchor lender’s balance sheet is lending to its owners’ other companies. In Stik Credit’s audited FY2025 accounts, receivables from related parties rose from BGN 10,083k to BGN 22,991k, about €11.75m at the fixed euro rate of 1.95583, or 33% of total assets of BGN 69,074k. Separately, BGN 10,570k of 2025 income came from selling financial assets, and note 12.2 shows this was a cession of lease receivables to a related party, unpaid at year end and settled in January 2026, inside a year whose pre-tax profit was BGN 4,942k. Net profit fell 35% year on year to BGN 4,403k as impairments rose 41%, and BGN 3,800k of that profit was paid out as dividend, roughly an 86% payout, while loan liabilities rose 54%.

• Bulgarian courts are voiding the consumer contracts that generate the yield. Sofia District Court decision No. 1481 of 29.01.2025 (case 52818/2024) found that a Stik Credit loan with a stated APR of 42.58% carried a real APR of 360% once the penalty for failing to provide a guarantor was counted, and declared the contract void under the Consumer Credit Act. A 2024 Pazardzhik District Court decision found a real APR of 603.85% on the same clause structure and ordered repayment to the borrower. Bulgaria’s Commission for Consumer Protection told Mediapool (14.08.2025) that its inspection identified 14 unfair clauses in Stik Credit’s terms. Outcomes are not uniform and some courts uphold the clause, but this is legal risk to the recoverability of the loan book that ultimately services investor interest, not a reputational footnote.

• No buyback, no compensation scheme, and the platform’s own accounts are unaudited and unpublished. The pre-2025 product carried a 60-day buyback. The current one does not: loans are unsecured unless stated otherwise, there is a three-day grace period, and after that Afranga negotiates. ECSP status carries no deposit guarantee and no investor compensation scheme, which Afranga states plainly in its help centre. No auditor is named for Afranga EOOD anywhere, and re:think P2P (27.08.2026) records “Auditor: Not Available. No external audit firm engaged.” Meanwhile the site contradicts itself in ways that matter: the homepage claims “€100M+ invested” and “5,000+ investors” against €41.97m and 7,484 on the statistics page, and the page metadata still promises “up to 18% per annum” and “protected by a buyback guarantee”, copy that belongs to a product retired in March 2025.

How It Works

1. Register and pass the ECSPR checks. Open an account (EEA or Swiss residents and companies), complete identity verification, and answer the appropriateness questionnaire required of crowdfunding providers. Non-sophisticated investors get a four-day reflection period on each investment.
2. Fund the account by bank transfer. EUR only, from an account in your own name, with a unique reference code. Afranga states funds usually arrive within one to two business days. SEPA Instant is not supported.
3. Choose marketplace loans or SaveSmart. On the marketplace you pick individual loans to lending companies, minimum €10, terms from one month to 60 months, with most structured as bullet repayments. SaveSmart is a fixed-term product at three, six or twelve months, funded solely by Stikcredit, with an optional reinvest toggle. There is no auto-invest.
4. Collect interest, and watch the exit. Interest accrues at the stated rate; late payments carry roughly two percentage points extra, credited to investors. Since August 2026 you can list marketplace loans on the secondary market at up to 15% discount or premium with no fee. SaveSmart cannot be listed, and early exit from it is capped at 30% of the last twelve months of SaveSmart investments, ceiling €5,000 per rolling year, with a 1% fee and manual approval.
5. Account for withholding tax. The originator deducts it at source: 10% for Bulgarian loans, 15% for Czech, 0% for French.

Who Afranga Is For

Afranga suits an experienced investor who understands exactly what they are buying and is sizing the position accordingly: short-dated, unsecured corporate lending to Bulgarian consumer-credit companies at 8-16%, under a real EU authorisation, with a working no-fee secondary market and a €10 entry point. Investors tracking their own numbers report solid delivery, with a median net return of 14.6% across 167 portfolios per P2P Dash (31.08.2026) and very low cash drag. If you already accept related-party lending as a category and simply want it priced honestly, Afranga is legible about the mechanics even where it is quiet about the ownership.

Afranga is not a fit for anyone treating a licence as a safety net. There is no buyback, no collateral on most loans, no compensation scheme, and no audited platform accounts. It is also a poor fit for investors who diversify by counting logos: adding five originators to the page has not moved the concentration, because three of them barely take investor money and three of them share owners with the platform. And it is not a fit if you want a long, tested record under the current model, which is about eighteen months old.

Compared to Alternatives

Afranga vs. Maclear. These are different products despite similar headline yields. Maclear lends to independent SME borrowers across Europe, so the borrower base is not owned by the platform, but its Swiss self-regulatory-organisation status covers anti-money-laundering compliance rather than investor protection, and its collateral recovery has barely been tested. Afranga has the stronger formal authorisation, an ECSP licence with EU passporting and conduct rules that Maclear’s SRO membership does not provide. Afranga has by far the weaker structural independence. An investor choosing on paperwork picks Afranga; an investor choosing on who actually owes the money picks Maclear.

Afranga vs. Mintos. Not a close contest on structure. Mintos is MiFID II-regulated, includes investor compensation of up to €20,000, runs a deep secondary market, has a decade of history and spreads across dozens of independent lending companies that compete on price. Yields are correspondingly lower, roughly 8-11%. Afranga pays more because it is concentrated, illiquid by comparison until very recently, and unprotected by any compensation scheme. Mintos is a core holding; Afranga, if held at all, is a small satellite.

Afranga vs. Nectaro. This is the honest comparison, because both run on related-party origination. Nectaro’s loans come entirely from lending companies owned by its parent Dyninno Group, and it says so openly. The difference is everything wrapped around that fact. Nectaro holds a full MiFID II investment-firm licence from Latvijas Banka, is inside the Latvian investor compensation scheme up to €20,000, publishes audited platform accounts by BDO, and carries a buyback obligation on each lending company. Afranga has an ECSP licence with no compensation scheme, no published platform audit, no buyback, and it has removed the ownership disclosure from its public pages. Same structural risk, materially weaker mitigation on every axis.

Bottom line on competitors. Afranga’s licence puts it above the genuinely unregulated end of the market, and its originator reporting is better than most peers of its size. What it does not have is any of the protections that make concentrated related-party lending survivable when a cycle turns.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Afranga on the Latvijas Banka warning list? No. Latvijas Banka publishes a list of companies lacking the appropriate licence or authorisation to provide financial services, published 24 October 2025 and last updated 14 July 2026. We read the full list on 1 September 2026. It names 15 companies. Neither Afranga nor Stik Credit is among them, and neither appears on the Bulgarian Financial Supervision Commission’s unlicensed-firms list. The regulatory record points the other way: Afranga holds a Bulgarian ECSP authorisation and appears on the French AMF white list.

Is there a buyback guarantee? No. The pre-March-2025 product had a 60-day buyback, and old reviews and even some of Afranga’s own page metadata still describe it. The current product does not. Loans are unsecured unless a specific loan states otherwise. If a lending company misses a payment there is a three-day grace period, then extra interest, then negotiation and possibly legal action.

Who actually owns the companies I am lending to? Three of the six originators, which between them have received about 96% of the money invested through the platform, are controlled by Afranga’s sole owner Svetlin Sabev and Stik Credit’s two controlling shareholders Stefan Topuzakov and Kristiyan Kostadinov. This is documented in the Bulgarian Commercial Register and confirmed in Stik Credit’s own audited FY2025 report, which names Afranga EOOD as an affiliate party. Afranga’s current About page and terms do not mention it.

Can I get my money out early? Marketplace loans can be sold on the secondary market that launched in late August 2026, at a price you set within 15% either side of outstanding principal, with no fee. SaveSmart cannot be listed and allows only a capped early withdrawal with a 1% fee and manual approval. Several investors reported withdrawal and bank-verification delays between January and June 2026, and Afranga publicly acknowledged a payment-provider backlog and slow verification handling.

Does the ECSP licence protect my capital? No. It regulates how the platform behaves, not whether the loans repay. Afranga states in its own help centre that investments are not covered by European deposit guarantee schemes and are not insured or guaranteed by any national or EU compensation scheme.

Bottom Line

Afranga has done the harder half of the job: it obtained a genuine EU crowdfunding licence, moved client money to a licensed payment institution, publishes originator financials, and shipped a working no-fee secondary market. What it has not done is fix, or even disclose, the fact that roughly 96% of investor money flows to lending companies its own owner helps control, while the anchor lender puts a third of its balance sheet into loans to those same owners’ companies and defends its consumer contracts against courts that keep finding real interest rates of 300% and higher. This is a platform for experienced investors taking a deliberately small position with clear eyes, not a core holding, and not somewhere to read the word “licensed” as the end of the analysis.

Affiliate disclosure. CrowdIndex earns a commission when readers sign up to platforms through links on this page. This does not affect our editorial assessment. Afranga’s ranking on CrowdIndex is based on the editorial criteria documented on our Methodology page. We last reviewed this article on September 1, 2026.