Ener2Crowd Review - It Publishes Its Default Rate, Which Is How You Can See It Go Up Tenfold

Italian green lending platform, live since 2019, authorised by Consob under the EU crowdfunding regulation, financing energy efficiency, renewables and environmental projects for Italian and Spanish companies. It does something most of its domestic peers do not: it publishes a proper Article 20 default disclosure, broken down by year and by risk grade, with a forward-looking estimate. That disclosure is also the most alarming document on the site. The retail default rate went from 0.65% in 2024 to 6.51% in 2025. Over the same period the platform closed its community chat and stopped paying for recovery litigation.

What is Ener2Crowd in 60 seconds

Ener2Crowd lends retail money to companies doing energy work in Italy and Spain: putting solar on a roof, refitting a building’s heating, revamping a small hydro plant. You lend directly to the company running the project, which in practice is often a special-purpose vehicle set up for that one job, and the loan is a mutuo di scopo, meaning the borrower is contractually restricted to spending the money on the stated project. You get a fixed coupon, terms run one to seven years, and you cannot get out early because there is no secondary market. There is no collateral package and no buyback: if the borrower stops paying, the platform’s own FAQ says it is your right to take legal action against them. Ener2Crowd is authorised by Consob under the EU crowdfunding regulation and your uninvested cash sits at Lemonway, a licensed payment institution, rather than with the platform. Neither of those protects the money you have already lent.

Strengths

• A real, checkable authorisation, with the exact scope on the record. Consob authorised Ener2crowd S.r.l. SB by delibera n. 22877 on 8 November 2023, under Article 4-sexies.1 of the Italian consolidated finance act and Article 12 of Regulation (EU) 2020/1503, after an application filed on 12 June 2023 and with Banca d’Italia consulted. The decision text is public, signed by the Consob president, and names two services: facilitation of granting of loans, and placement without firm commitment together with reception and transmission of orders. That second permission is why the equity line exists under the same licence. Individual portfolio management of loans is not granted, which is why there is no auto-invest. We found no Consob or Banca d’Italia sanction, warning, suspension or blacklist entry. In this market that is not automatic: Consob suspended Recrowd in July 2025 and Bridge Asset in June 2026, and RE-Lender has been liquidated.

• It actually publishes the Article 20 disclosure, and most of its peers do not. The statistics page carries an effective default rate calculated, in its own words, under Article 20(1) of Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 and Articles 2 and 3 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/2115. It is broken down by year, split between the retail and professional-investor channels, further split across five internal risk grades, and accompanied by a forward-looking estimate for the next twelve months built from weighted macro, sector and financial indicators. Annual Rendiconto documents for 2023, 2024 and 2025 are linked from the same page. We looked for this document on Trusters and could not find one at all, and on that platform the absence left us guessing. Here we are not guessing, and everything critical in the next section is possible only because Ener2Crowd published the numbers.

• Client money is outside the platform, and there is a real professional indemnity policy. Uninvested cash sits in a Lemonway wallet. Lemonway is a French payment institution supervised by the ACPR and passported across the EU, and Ener2Crowd acts only as its registered payment agent under Article 128-quater of the Italian banking act. Borrower wallets are held open by the platform until a campaign closes, so the money cannot be drawn early. Separately the platform holds professional indemnity policy 430771470 with Generali Italia, the insurance route permitted under Article 11 ECSPR. None of this covers borrower default, and there is no investor compensation scheme of any kind under ECSPR.

• Institutional money has been through the books, and the utility partnerships are genuine. The EUR 1.2M capital increase closed in July 2023 was led by Larry S.p.A., the investment vehicle of the Falck industrial family, with Credit Agricole Italia taking a roughly EUR 170,000 stake at the close; the company says a Big Four firm ran due diligence, though it does not name which. On the project side, campaigns with Enel Green Power, RWE and Gruppo Dolomiti Energia are confirmed on the counterparties’ own communications, and Nadara, the former Falck Renewables, runs a white-label Ener2Crowd platform at coltiviamoenergia.it. These are not press-release-only relationships.

Things to Watch

• The default rate went up roughly tenfold in one year, and the platform still leads with cumulative totals. Ener2Crowd’s own Article 20 figures for the retail channel read 0.83% in 2023, 0.65% in 2024 and 6.51% in 2025. That is a multiple of 10.0 year on year, and the 2025 figure alone is about 2.4 times the three-year mean of 2.66% that the page headlines, both of which are CrowdIndex arithmetic on their numbers. By risk grade the 2025 damage concentrates in two bands, 13.33% in the RE grade and 7.69% in RME. The platform’s own forecast for the next twelve months puts RME at 8.74% and RE at 4.78%, so it does not expect a return to the old numbers. Meanwhile the homepage still leads with cumulative euros raised and an average interest rate, and carries an investor testimonial praising a “bassissima” rate of delays and defaults.

• The headline 8.06% is a coupon, not a return, and there is no loss line to net it against. The platform labels the figure tasso di interesse medio, an average interest rate. Nothing on the site converts that into what investors actually received after defaults, because nothing on the site quantifies a loss: there is no definitive-loss row, no arrears figure, no amount recovered and no loss-given-default. The Article 20 disclosure counts loans entering default in a twelve-month window, which is not a share of capital and not a loss rate. It also states that where a loan is renegotiated the arrears clock restarts on the new schedule, so rescheduling suppresses the measured rate. And although the page itself cites Article 2(5) of the delegated regulation, which requires the numerator and denominator to be published alongside the rate, neither is there. One investor on Trustpilot on 26 August 2026 put the arithmetic in plain terms after roughly two years and 25 investments: more money lost to defaults than collected in interest.

• Professional-investor deals are removed from the headline number, and they are the better-protected ones. The disclosure reports professional projects separately at 0.00%, 0.00% and 3.70%, and justifies the split at length on the grounds that those deals carry a public guarantee and larger tickets. That is a stated choice rather than a concealment, and it is defensible. It also means the retail series, the one a retail investor reads, has had the cohort with sovereign-backed protection stripped out of it. The 2.66% three-year average is not a whole-portfolio figure.

• The platform withdrew its community channel and its funding of recovery litigation at exactly the point defaults surged. In early December 2025 the general Telegram community chat, about 247 members, was closed; investors set up an unofficial replacement, and by 12 December one participant counted nine separate default threads inside it. In mid-January 2026 the platform stopped paying legal fees on recovery actions, starting with the GA Impianti case. Both come from the Finanzaonline forum thread, so they are reported by investors and not documented by us, except that the second is corroborated by the company itself: in a Trustpilot reply of 9 April 2026 Ener2Crowd states that ECSPR obliges it to remain neutral between investors and borrowers, that legal action must therefore be brought by investors, and that it coordinates one lawyer and splits the costs proportionally among the investors who join. Two independent sources agreeing makes that one established. The named borrower cases investors circulate, Ycare, Dax Solar, GA Impianti, On Power, Genius Watter, Zappala and others, are unverified by us. One is not: Solar Cash S.r.l. was placed in liquidazione giudiziale n. 251/2025 by the Tribunale di Milano on 28 April 2025, which is on the public creditors’ portal, and investors report it sits behind six Ener2Crowd projects.

• Nothing secures the loan, and the credit work is often done on a different company than the borrower. There is no mortgage, no pledge, no parent guarantee and no buyback anywhere in the framework contract or the client-information disclosure. The strongest credit support we saw on a live deal was a lettera di patronage, a comfort letter rather than a guarantee, plus direct-debit channelling of rents. On that same deal, project 193, the platform states openly that because the borrower is a vehicle company the credit analysis was performed on its parent instead. Investors have made exactly that complaint independently, that the scoring is run on holdings while the money goes to thin SPVs. The EnerScore credit model is real and partly outsourced, with EasyFintech supplying the credit analysis and Cerved an ESG score of the borrowing company, but a score is not security.

• Origination appears to have more than halved, the operator is loss-making, and its own counters disagree with each other. The Politecnico di Milano Osservatorio put Ener2Crowd second among Italian lending platforms with EUR 16.62M in the year to June 2025, about 12% of the market. In the following year’s report it is named once, as a passported platform, and is absent from the list of platforms exceeding EUR 10M, which implies a fall of at least 40%; that inference is ours, drawn from an exclusion list rather than a stated figure, in a year when the whole Italian market fell 36.8%. The operator behind it had revenue of EUR 930,670 and a net loss of EUR 347,469 in 2024, after EUR 567,153 and a loss of EUR 476,415 in 2023, with seven employees; the two disclosed losses together, EUR 823,884, absorb about 69% of the EUR 1.2M raised in 2023, which is our arithmetic. FY2025 accounts were not available and are the ones that matter. Smaller but telling: on 2 September 2026 the statistics page, the Italian homepage and the English homepage gave three different cumulative totals, the widest gap being EUR 861,257.77, and two pages gave the average rate as 8.06% and 8.01%. Trustpilot sits at 2.6 out of 5 on 145 reviews, with 44 of them in the last twelve months.

How It Works

1. Register and pass identity checks. Open an account, complete KYC, the anti-money-laundering identity verification. Your wallet is opened at Lemonway, not at Ener2Crowd.
2. Fund the wallet. By bank transfer or card. Wallets with no activity and a zero balance for twelve months are suspended after 30 days’ notice.
3. Pick individual deals. Each campaign shows the borrower, the amount sought, the rate, the term, the repayment structure and an EnerScore risk grade running from RC to REE. There are four repayment shapes: fixed instalments, variable instalments, interest-only with capital at the end, and everything at the end. Minimums are set per project and we saw both EUR 100 and EUR 300.
4. Wait. Terms run one to seven years. There is no secondary market and no bulletin board, so there is no exit. You have 15 days from payment to withdraw without penalty under the framework contract, although the confirmation screen says 14.
5. If the deal goes wrong, the recovery is yours to run. Late-payment interest accrues, and the platform’s FAQ states that it is the investor’s right to take legal action against the project owner. Ener2Crowd coordinates a single lawyer and, since January 2026, splits the costs among the investors who take part rather than funding them itself.

Who Ener2Crowd Is For

Ener2Crowd suits an investor who specifically wants Italian and Spanish energy-transition credit risk, reads every campaign individually, is comfortable that the security is the borrower’s balance sheet and nothing else, and can leave money untouched for up to seven years. The environmental angle is the whole product, and if that mandate is what you are buying, no other Italian lending platform is as focused on it. The published Article 20 disclosure is a genuine reason to prefer it over a domestic peer that publishes nothing.

It is a poor fit for anyone who needs liquidity, since there is no exit before maturity of any kind. It is a poor fit for anyone sizing a position off a headline default statistic, because the relevant number here is not the 2.66% three-year mean but the 6.51% of 2025 and the platform’s own forecast of up to 8.74% in one risk grade. It is a poor fit for anyone who wants the recovery handled for them, since as of January 2026 it is not. And it does not work as a core holding: single sector, two countries, one currency, no collateral, no diversification mechanism, and an operator with seven staff and two consecutive years of losses.

Compared to Alternatives

Ener2Crowd vs. Maclear. Different regulators and different risk. Ener2Crowd holds a genuine EU crowdfunding authorisation from Consob with a public decision text and a named legal basis; Maclear operates under a Swiss self-regulatory organisation whose remit is anti-money-laundering compliance, not investor protection, and it is not an ECSP. On disclosure, Ener2Crowd is clearly ahead: it publishes a default rate by year and by risk grade, which Maclear does not, and it publishes a rate that has gone badly wrong rather than one that flatters. On yield Maclear advertises realised returns of 14.5% to 14.9% against a 6% to 10% range here, before Italy’s 26% tax on financial income. Neither has an investor compensation scheme, and both have an untested recovery story: Maclear’s only known default, the Vibroedil case of 2025, was made good from the chief executive’s personal funds rather than by enforcing the stated security, while Ener2Crowd has stated security on almost nothing and has stopped funding the enforcement.

Ener2Crowd vs. Mintos. Not substitutes. Mintos is a Latvian investment firm under MiFID II, the EU’s main investment-firm regulation, with investor compensation up to EUR 20,000 in eligible scenarios, a working secondary market, dozens of independent loan originators and a ten-year record. Ener2Crowd is a small sector-specialist lending portal with no secondary market, no compensation scheme, no collateral and an origination book that appears to have halved. Mintos yields of 8% to 11% are at or above Ener2Crowd’s published average coupon, so the trade is not yield for safety; the only thing Ener2Crowd offers that Mintos does not is the environmental mandate. If that mandate matters to you, hold it as a small satellite.

Ener2Crowd vs. Trusters. The most instructive comparison we can make, because the two Italian platforms fail in mirror image. Trusters, in real estate, publishes a vintage table with no loss line at all and calls exactly one project in eight years a default while eighty have passed 90 days late; we could not find its Article 20 disclosure anywhere. Ener2Crowd publishes the Article 20 disclosure properly, splits it by risk grade and forecasts forward, and what it shows is a rate that went from 0.65% to 6.51% in a year. On transparency Ener2Crowd wins outright. On the underlying asset Trusters wins: its loans are secured against Italian property that can be sold, whereas an Ener2Crowd loan to a project vehicle has, in the deals we could read, no security at all. On liquidity both are equally locked. Neither operator is healthy, but Trusters at least sits under a listed parent, while Ener2Crowd is a seven-person company that has lost money in both years for which a result is published.

Bottom line on competitors. Ener2Crowd is one of the more honest disclosers in a market where disclosure is scarce, and the honesty is what makes it hard to recommend. Nobody else in the Italian field hands you a document showing their own default rate rising tenfold. Take the document seriously rather than crediting the platform for publishing it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Ener2Crowd authorised? Yes. Consob authorised Ener2crowd S.r.l. SB by delibera n. 22877 on 8 November 2023 under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503, for facilitation of granting of loans and for placement without firm commitment plus reception and transmission of orders. Individual portfolio management of loans is not included, which is why there is no auto-invest. The authorisation governs how the platform operates. It does not protect your capital, and ECSPR provides no investor compensation scheme of any kind. The Spanish operation appears to run on a passport of that authorisation, but we could not read the ESMA register to confirm it.

What is the actual default rate? The platform’s own Article 20 disclosure gives the retail effective default rate as 0.83% for 2023, 0.65% for 2024 and 6.51% for 2025, with a three-year mean of 2.66%. Professional-investor projects are reported separately at 0.00%, 0.00% and 3.70% and are excluded from the retail series. Note three things. The figure counts loans entering default in a twelve-month window, not capital lost, and no loss figure is published anywhere. Renegotiating a loan restarts the arrears clock on the new schedule. And the numerator and denominator are not published, although the page cites the provision requiring them. A Trustpilot reviewer in April 2026 cited 10.10% for 2025 from the same page that now reads 6.51%; the platform replied the next day with roughly 6.5%, being 14 loans of 215. We have not established which reading is correct.

Is my investment secured? Generally not. The framework contract and the client-information disclosure contain no mortgage, no pledge, no parent guarantee and no buyback. The loan is a mutuo di scopo, which restricts what the borrower may spend the money on but gives you no claim on an asset. On one live deal the credit support was a comfort letter plus channelling of rental income, which is weaker than a guarantee. Professional-investor deals are described as carrying a public guarantee; retail deals are not.

What do I actually pay? The homepage advertises “ZERO costi di gestione”. The contract charges you 3% of the interest you receive, 10% of any late-payment interest, and 2% of the amount invested on the equity line. Those charges are conditional on agreement with each borrower, so check the key investment information sheet for the specific deal. On tax, the platform says that as the agent of a payment institution it cannot act as a withholding agent for lending income, so Italian investors declare it themselves at 26%; Spanish borrowers withhold 19% at source. The site’s own answer on this is internally hard to follow and worth taking to your accountant.

Are the CO2 savings verified by anyone? No, as far as we could establish. On the project pages the platform states that the saving was calculated from figures supplied by the borrower, based on the expected improvement from the works rather than measured performance. We found no published methodology document, no stated emission factor, no reference to the GHG Protocol, ISO 14064, PCAF or any recognised standard, and no certification body, auditor or university providing assurance. The third parties the site does name, EasyFintech and Cerved, assess creditworthiness and corporate ESG posture, not tonnes of carbon. Comparing two of the platform’s own project pages gives a constant conversion of 0.43 kg of CO2 per kWh, which is our arithmetic on their figures and is roughly double recent Italian grid-mix factors; the constant itself is not disclosed. The site nonetheless says it “certifies” the environmental impact.

Bottom Line

Ener2Crowd is properly authorised, publishes the default disclosure that European law requires and most of its Italian peers do not, and is the only serious domestic option for investors who specifically want energy-transition credit. Every one of those things is real. So is what the disclosure says: the retail default rate went from 0.65% to 6.51% in a single year, the better-protected professional deals are reported outside that number, no loss or recovery figure exists to net against the 8.06% average coupon, and the platform’s own forecast does not expect the old rates back. Around the same period it closed its community chat and stopped paying for recovery litigation, its origination appears to have more than halved, and the environmental impact it says it “certifies” rests on borrower forecasts and an undisclosed conversion factor. Read the statistics page before the homepage, treat the coupon as a gross contract rate rather than a return, and size any position for the possibility that you will be running the recovery yourself.

Affiliate disclosure. CrowdIndex earns a commission when readers sign up to platforms through links on this page. This does not affect our editorial assessment. Ener2Crowd is not currently an affiliate partner of CrowdIndex, and the link above goes directly to the platform. Ener2Crowd’s ranking on CrowdIndex is based on the editorial criteria documented on our Methodology page. We last reviewed this article on 2 September 2026.