EvenFi Review - The Small Spanish-Licensed Platform About to Absorb October’s Lenders

EvenFi is a crowdlending platform authorised by Spain’s securities regulator, run from Bergamo in northern Italy, and known until late 2021 as Criptalia. It is small: EUR 38.6M lent across 507 projects in six years. It is also, from September 2026, the destination for the lender accounts of October, the largest SME lending platform continental Europe ever had. Two things about EvenFi deserve more attention than its size suggests. It publishes a default disclosure that most of its peers do not, and the numbers in that disclosure are bad.

What is EvenFi in 60 seconds

EvenFi is a marketplace where retail investors lend to small businesses. A company applies, EvenFi assesses it and assigns a rating from A+ to D, the project is listed, and investors fund it from EUR 20 upwards in exchange for interest. There is no buyback guarantee: if the borrower stops paying, your money depends on recovery, not on anyone repurchasing your position.

Two structural details matter more than the lending itself. First, the group is split across two countries. The Italian company Criptalia Srl, in Bergamo, built and runs the technology and owns 93.75% of the Spanish company. The Spanish company, EvenFi Fintech S.A., holds the licence. CEO Diego Dal Cero has said publicly why: Spain had a national crowdlending law when they started in 2018 and Italy did not, so “Spain was the only possible choice” (Millionaire, November 2022).

Second, EvenFi increasingly does not describe itself as a lending platform at all. Its own homepage says it is “infrastructure, the regulated backbone that other platforms use under their own brand”, and lists twelve white-label clients. Attached to that is a service called run-off: taking over the loan book of a platform that is closing, and administering the remaining loans to maturity. Rendimento Etico, suspended by Italy’s Consob, was the first client. October is the third and by far the largest.

Strengths

• A real, directly verifiable authorisation from a national securities regulator. EvenFi Fintech S.A. is entered in the CNMV register of crowdfunding service providers under number 5, dated 17 February 2023, and you can read the entry yourself. That is the ECSP regime under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503: conduct rules, mandatory pre-contractual disclosure, an entry knowledge test for retail investors, and conflict-of-interest requirements. It is a genuinely higher bar than the Swiss self-regulatory membership our Editor’s Pick operates under. Two caveats belong in the same breath. ECSP authorisation regulates conduct, not solvency, and it carries no investor compensation scheme. And CNMV’s own record confirms EvenFi holds no banking, e-money, payment or MiFID permission, which is why client money sits with Mangopay rather than with EvenFi.

• It publishes an Article 20 default disclosure, and publishes it honestly enough to look bad. Article 20 of the crowdfunding regulation requires providers to publish default rates for at least the preceding 36 months. EvenFi does, broken down by cohort year and by credit rating, using the 90-day definition set out in Implementing Regulation (EU) 2022/2120, last updated 29 January 2026. Across the eight Italian and French platforms we have examined, the pattern has been headline claims of zero investor losses sitting on top of visibly troubled portfolios. EvenFi is the exception: it prints a 28.60% project default rate on its own website. That does not make the portfolio good. It makes the disclosure usable, which is rarer than it should be.

• Low entry, working secondary market, and functioning automation. EUR 20 per project is among the lowest minimums in the European market. The secondary market genuinely operates, with the seller setting the price, a premium and discount indicator, a yield-to-maturity display, and, to EvenFi’s credit, a filter that exposes loans which are late or have a history of late payment, with a warning shown to both buyer and seller. Auto-invest works on rating band, rate band, term and amount, with optional SEPA auto top-ups. For a platform this small, the tooling is better than expected.

Things to Watch

• The default numbers are severe, and worse than the headline once you strip out the young loans. EvenFi reports 28.60% of projects and 16.90% of the amount lent in default. But 2024, 2025 and 2026 loans have not had time to reach 90 days past due, and they drag the average down: the 2025 cohort shows 1.96%. Restricting the count to the four cohorts old enough to be judged, 2020 to 2023, our arithmetic on EvenFi’s own figures gives roughly 33.5% of projects and roughly 21.6% of the amount in default. Put plainly, on the seasoned part of the book, about one project in three has failed to pay for ninety days. The worst single cohort is 2021, at 38.71% of projects. Worse still, defaults are not concentrated in the risky ratings: grade B, the second-safest band and the one carrying 175 of the 507 projects, defaults at 36.00%, higher than grade C. A rating scale that does not separate outcomes is not doing its job. And EvenFi’s own footnote carves out a further slice: “extended or restructured projects that are performing are not included”. A loan renegotiated before day ninety never enters the count.

• There is no realised loss figure, so nobody knows what any of this cost. Everything EvenFi publishes is amount in default, which is exposure at the moment a loan goes ninety days past due. It is not capital definitively lost. There is no recovery rate, no write-off line, and no outcome statement we could find. The only net return the platform has ever published is “above 6%”, dated April 2022, and the same page explains how it was calculated: defaulted loans marked at 0% to 30% of value, loans over ninety days late at 30% to 70%. That is a model, not a measurement, and it has not been updated in over four years. Treat every return figure associated with EvenFi as an upper bound.

• Public sentiment has collapsed, and the timing lines up with the defaults. EvenFi’s Trustpilot score is 1.2 out of 5 across roughly 417 reviews as of September 2026. In April 2022 the same platform sat at 4.7 out of 5. The distribution is a barbell, 45% five-star and 42% one-star, with the five-star bulk old and the one-star bulk recent, and Trustpilot flags both that the profile was merged and that EvenFi has not responded to negative reviews. On the Italian investor forum FinanzaOnLine, one lender wrote in March 2026 that they were “a shade past MINUS 50%, gross”, and another in April 2026 described being offered a discounted settlement as “a fine piece of blackmail: if you refuse, they wash their hands of it and you handle the debt collection yourself”. These are individual accounts, not audited data. They are also consistent with a 33.5% seasoned default rate.

• The operator is small, loss-making and has shed most of its staff. Italian registry aggregators reporting Criptalia Srl’s filed accounts show a loss of EUR 540,884 in 2023 and EUR 221,527 in 2024, with headcount falling from 14 to 3 and staff costs from EUR 492,624 to EUR 147,490 across the same two years (Visurissima, citing Registro Imprese; Ufficiocamerale separately reports revenue of EUR 222,315 and a smaller loss of EUR 22,509 for 2025). Net equity is not published free of charge anywhere we looked. The Spanish company’s share capital is EUR 160,000 per BORME. The one outside investment we could document is a round of just over EUR 2.2M announced in January 2023, led by Pacific Capital Partners through a Spanish vehicle, part of it raised by equity crowdfunding on WeAreStarting. This is not a business with institutional depth behind it, and a three-person operating company is now about to take on administration of a portfolio larger than everything it has ever originated.

• A five-year-old platform with no full cycle behind it, and no safety net under it. EvenFi has been lending since 2020. There is no buyback guarantee, no provision fund, and no investor compensation scheme, because ECSP authorisation does not include one. If a borrower fails, recovery is the only mechanism, and EvenFi publishes nothing about how well recovery has worked.

The October Migration: What Actually Transfers

This is the most consequential thing happening to EvenFi, and almost every fact about it comes from October rather than from EvenFi. EvenFi has published no announcement of its own that we could find. Commercial terms are disclosed nowhere. The account below is taken from October’s migration FAQ on october.eu.

What transfers. The platform, not the loans. Lender accounts move to EvenFi during September 2026, and EvenFi takes over the dashboard, repayment reporting and, after a joint transition period, user support. October’s own wording is that the loans “do not change hands”; what changes is where you log in.

What does not transfer. The loan agreements themselves are untouched: October states they are “not novated, amended or terminated”, and each borrower’s obligation runs to the individual lender exactly as before. Repayments continue between the 15th and 20th of each month.

Who carries the bad book, which is the question that matters. October, not EvenFi. In October’s words, recovery on loans in arrears or default continues to be run by October’s teams “and the associated costs remain with us”. EvenFi is scheduled to take over collections only once the portfolio falls below 1% of the amounts originally lent, which October does not expect before early 2028. So EvenFi is being handed the administration of a performing run-off book and the customer relationship, while the distressed workout, and the cost of it, stays with the seller for at least another eighteen months. That is a materially better deal for EvenFi than “absorbing October’s portfolio” would imply, and a materially better outcome for October’s lenders than a full handover of a workout to a three-person company would have been.

Payments. October’s LemonWay infrastructure migrates across with the accounts, and funds stay in segregated LemonWay wallets. EvenFi’s own platform runs on Mangopay. After September, the group operates two payment rails at once.

Onboarding. EvenFi will re-onboard and re-classify every transferred lender, as the crowdfunding regulation requires. Valid existing documentation does not need to be resubmitted, and sophisticated-investor status will be reviewed against EvenFi’s own criteria.

Regulation. EvenFi is supervised by CNMV in Spain and passported into France. October says it remains under AMF oversight until its own crowdfunding authorisation is formally withdrawn, and that both regulators are being kept informed. Note the sequencing here: EvenFi’s passport into France, and into 27 other EEA states, took effect on 20 March 2026, weeks before Aether acquired October in April. Before that date EvenFi could operate in Italy, Portugal and Spain only. The passport expansion is what made this deal legally possible.

New projects. October says offering new projects to migrated lenders is “the plan”, with no date set.

The scale mismatch is the part nobody has written down. October’s remaining book was under EUR 35M in September 2026. EvenFi has lent EUR 38.6M in its entire six-year existence. October reported 43,987 lenders; EvenFi’s own homepage claims 20,000+ investors. On our arithmetic from those published figures, EvenFi is taking on a book roughly equal to its lifetime origination and a user base roughly twice its own. Whether the incoming lenders stay is a separate question: they are arriving from a platform that returned 3.22% net across all vintages, into one whose seasoned cohorts default at about a third of projects.

How It Works

1. Register and pass the entry test. You create an account and, as a retail investor under the crowdfunding regulation, complete a knowledge test and acknowledge the risk warnings before you can invest.
2. Complete identity checks. Standard KYC. Client money is then held at Mangopay, a French electronic money institution, which is why your account IBAN begins with FR.
3. Fund the account. SEPA transfer, or card, which EvenFi’s helpdesk confirms carries no fee. Optional SEPA direct-debit auto top-ups are available.
4. Choose projects, or let Auto Invest choose. Browse listings with their rating and rate, or set Auto Invest rules on rating band, interest band, term and amount. Minimum EUR 20 per project. Repayment structures vary widely: bullet, French and Italian amortising, multi-bullet with balloon, and a “dynamic” loan whose principal repays as a function of borrower turnover with no fixed schedule.
5. Collect repayments, or try to exit. Interest and capital arrive per the loan schedule. To exit early you must sell on the secondary market, which currently handles bullet loans only, at whatever price a buyer accepts. There is no buyback and no provision fund, so a defaulted loan leaves you dependent on recovery.

Who EvenFi Is For

EvenFi suits a narrow group: experienced crowdlending investors who already understand SME credit, who want exposure to Italian small business and renewable energy, who can size a position small enough that a one-in-three project failure rate is survivable, and who value the fact that the platform publishes that failure rate rather than hiding it. The EUR 20 minimum makes wide diversification cheap, and on this portfolio wide diversification is not optional.

EvenFi is not appropriate for a beginner, for anyone who needs the money back on a schedule, or for anyone reading a headline yield and assuming it is achievable. The gap between the advertised “up to 12%” and the realised outcome is unquantified because EvenFi does not publish realised losses, and every indirect signal, the 33.5% seasoned default rate, the FinanzaOnLine investor reporting minus 50% gross, the 1.2 Trustpilot score, points the same direction. Investors arriving automatically from October in September should understand that they have been moved to a platform with a materially different risk profile from the one they signed up to, and that nothing obliges them to invest in anything new once they arrive.

Compared to Alternatives

EvenFi versus October. These two are now joined, so the comparison is unavoidable. October published its numbers and they were disappointing: 3.22% net internal rate of return across all vintages, 5.53% of capital in default. EvenFi also publishes its numbers and they are far worse: 16.90% of the amount lent in default across all cohorts, around 21.6% on the seasoned ones. October had institutional co-investors including the European Investment Fund sitting in the same loans as retail lenders on the same terms. EvenFi has one documented outside round of EUR 2.2M. October’s business failed because 3% net could not sustain the platform economics. That is a sobering benchmark to hold against a successor whose seasoned book defaults at a third of projects.

EvenFi versus Mintos. Mintos is the obvious alternative for anyone arriving from October and wondering where else to go. It is regulated as a MiFID II investment firm by Latvijas Banka, which brings investor compensation of up to EUR 20,000 for platform failure or misappropriation of client funds, something no ECSP authorisation provides. It has a deep secondary market, a decade of history and dozens of independent originators. EvenFi’s advantages over Mintos are narrow: a lower minimum, direct SME exposure rather than exposure through loan originators, and a default disclosure that is more granular than most. On regulatory protection and liquidity, there is no contest.

EvenFi versus Maclear. Maclear is CrowdIndex’s Editor’s Pick and lends to European SMEs, so the product is comparable. The regulatory comparison runs the other way from most of our cards: EvenFi holds a securities-regulator authorisation under EU law, while Maclear operates under Swiss self-regulatory organisation membership covering anti-money-laundering compliance only. On disclosure, EvenFi publishes a cohort-level default table and Maclear does not. On everything else, portfolio performance, operator finances, public sentiment, scale, Maclear is ahead by a wide margin. The honest summary is that EvenFi has the better regulatory wrapper and the worse business inside it.

Bottom line on competitors. EvenFi’s distinguishing feature in the European market is not its returns or its size. It is that a platform this troubled is willing to print its own default table. That transparency is what allows this card to be specific, and what makes the conclusion unfavourable. Most of its Italian peers publish nothing comparable, which should be read as a reason to distrust their silence rather than a reason to prefer them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is EvenFi regulated? Yes, by the CNMV in Spain, as a crowdfunding service provider under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503, register number 5, since 17 February 2023. It is passported into all 30 EEA countries, which means other national regulators, including the AMF in France, list it but do not authorise it. Important limits: this regime governs conduct and disclosure, not solvency, and unlike a MiFID investment firm licence it carries no investor compensation scheme. CNMV’s record also confirms EvenFi holds no banking, e-money or payment permission of its own.

Is EvenFi the same company as Criptalia? Effectively yes. The business was founded in Bergamo in 2018 as Criptalia, went live in 2020, and announced the rename to EvenFi in September 2021. The Italian company is still legally called Criptalia Srl and owns 93.75% of the Spanish licensed entity. The original name referred to blockchain infrastructure rather than crypto trading, and Crowdfunding Buzz reported in January 2026 that the brand was set aside in marketing to avoid the association with cryptocurrency platforms.

What is EvenFi’s default rate? By its own published figures, dated 29 January 2026: 28.60% of projects and 16.90% of the amount lent, across all cohorts from 2020. Excluding the 2024 to 2026 cohorts, which are too young to have defaulted yet, our own arithmetic on those figures gives roughly 33.5% of projects and 21.6% of the amount. EvenFi also notes that performing restructured or extended loans are excluded from the count.

How much have investors actually lost? Nobody outside EvenFi can say, because EvenFi does not publish it. What it publishes is the amount in default, which is exposure at ninety days past due, before any recovery. There is no write-off figure and no recovery rate. The last net return the platform published, “above 6%”, dates from April 2022 and was calculated by marking defaulted loans at between 0% and 30% of value rather than by measuring what came back.

I am an October lender. What happens to me? Your account moves to EvenFi during September 2026 and October will confirm the exact date by email. Your loan agreements do not change, repayments continue between the 15th and 20th of each month, your balance stays accessible and withdrawals remain free. Recovery on late and defaulted loans stays with October’s team, at October’s cost, until the book falls below 1% of the amount originally lent, which October does not expect before early 2028. EvenFi will re-onboard you for identity checks. You are not obliged to invest in anything new on EvenFi, and given the default figures above you should treat any new project as a fresh decision rather than a continuation.

Can I get my money out early? Only by selling on the secondary market, which currently handles bullet loans and lets the seller set the price. There is no buyback guarantee, no provision fund and no other early-exit mechanism. Selling at a steep discount requires the advanced secondary market tier.

What does it cost? Card deposits are free, per EvenFi’s own helpdesk, and EvenFi describes secondary market trading as free. A full investor fee schedule could not be read from EvenFi’s own terms pages, which returned empty. Several Italian review sites, including Fintastico and Mercati24, state that investors pay no commission and that EvenFi charges the borrower side. We have not been able to verify that against a document EvenFi controls.

Bottom Line

EvenFi does something most of its peers refuse to do: it publishes a cohort-level default table on its own website. That single act of transparency is the strongest thing about it, and it is also what condemns it, because the table shows roughly a third of seasoned projects going ninety days past due, with the supposedly safe B grade defaulting more often than the riskier C grade. There is no realised loss figure to soften or confirm that, no buyback, no provision fund and no compensation scheme. Behind the platform sits an operating company that has shrunk from fourteen employees to three while running losses.

Into that, in September 2026, arrive roughly 44,000 October lenders and a run-off book about the size of everything EvenFi has ever originated. The structure of that deal is more sensible than the headline suggests, because October keeps the distressed workout and its cost until at least 2028. But the direction of travel is clear: EvenFi is becoming an administrator of other platforms’ endings, and its own lending record does not recommend it as a place to start something new. If you are already an October lender, read the migration FAQ, keep your own record of your positions, and do not treat arriving on EvenFi as a reason to invest on it.

Affiliate disclosure. CrowdIndex earns a commission when readers sign up to some platforms through links on this page. EvenFi is not an affiliate partner of CrowdIndex and there is no commercial link on this page. EvenFi’s placement on CrowdIndex is based on the editorial criteria documented on our Methodology page. Capital at risk.