Trusters Review - A Real Consob Licence, and a Statistics Page With No Loss Line

Italian real-estate crowdlending platform, live since 2018, authorised by Consob under the EU crowdfunding regulation, and majority-owned by a listed Milan micro-cap that renamed itself Entera in July 2026. It publishes a vintage-by-vintage status table, which is more than most Italian competitors do. That table is also the problem. It has no column for money lost. Of 529 projects ever funded, 80 have passed the platform’s own 90-day threshold, carrying roughly EUR 15.8M. Exactly one of them, worth EUR 200,000, is called a default.

What is Trusters in 60 seconds

Trusters lends retail money to Italian property developers. A developer needs short-term funding to buy, renovate and resell a building, the platform publishes the deal, and you lend from EUR 250. You are a lender, not a part-owner: you get a fixed rate agreed up front, not a share of the profit, and in most deals you get nothing at all until the end, when capital and interest arrive together. Terms on the live deals run 15 months. There is no way out early, because there is no secondary market. Trusters is authorised by Consob under the EU crowdfunding regulation, and money waiting to be invested sits at Lemonway, a licensed payment institution, rather than with the platform. Neither of those things protects you if a developer fails to repay.

Strengths

• A real, checkable authorisation, with the exact scope on the record. Trusters is authorised by Consob under delibera n. 22918 of 6 December 2023, granted under Article 12 of Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 after an application filed on 11 July 2023 and with Banca d’Italia consulted. The decision text is public and names one service only: facilitation of granting of loans, Article 2(1)(a)(i). The ESMA register confirms the entry as Active and adds that the licence is without individual portfolio management of loans, which is why there is no auto-invest. We found no Consob or Banca d’Italia sanction, warning, suspension or blacklist entry against Trusters. That is worth stating plainly, because two Italian peers do have them: Rendimento Etico was suspended by Consob for a year in April 2025 after an inspection, and Recrowd carries a Banca d’Italia sanction of June 2026.

• Vintage-level status disclosure, which most Italian competitors do not offer. The page at trusters.it/le-statistiche-di-trusters breaks every year from 2018 onwards into project counts and euro amounts across seven status labels, including two that separate loans more than 90 days late into those still being chased and those where the chase has ended. Because those numbers exist, this review can be specific rather than impressionistic, and an investor can see that the 2019 to 2023 vintages behave very differently from the 2024 one.

• It publishes the number almost nobody publishes: what late deals actually paid. The investor report to 30 June 2025 states the average interest earned on projects that closed in extra proroga as 2.84%, against 8.24% for those that closed on time. Most platforms will tell you a deal eventually closed and leave it there. Trusters tells you the return was destroyed. That is genuine disclosure, and it is the reason the gap described below is visible at all.

• Investors pay nothing, and the money sits outside the platform. The terms and conditions state plainly that no fee is due from the investor, and that Trusters is paid by the project owners. Uninvested cash is held at Lemonway under French ACPR supervision, with Trusters acting only as payment agent, so a platform failure would not put idle balances at risk. Neither point does anything for money already lent out.

Things to Watch

• There is no loss line, and only one deal in eight years is called a default. Homunity, in France, at least prints a definitive-loss row and puts a zero in it. Trusters does not print the row. The statistics page has no column for capital lost, recovered or written off. What it has is a bucket called Chiuso extra proroga / Default strumento, and the platform’s own footnote defines it as repayment more than 90 days late where recovery activity has ended with a return of the sums owed “anche solo parziale”, that is, possibly only partial. So a deal where investors got half their money back is filed as concluded, and the missing half is never quantified anywhere on the site. The single project labelled Default societa is a EUR 200,000 deal from the 2020 vintage where investors lost everything, and it has been the only one across three successive investor reports. Investors describe the effect in their own words: one Trustpilot reviewer writes that projects partly or wholly unrepaid are shown as “conclusi” alongside those repaid in full (19 September 2025), another that the platform “non pubblica statistiche sulle perdite” (21 July 2025).

• The arithmetic behind that, which is ours and not theirs. Adding the buckets as read on 1 September 2026: 59 closed projects worth EUR 11,960,550 and 20 still-running projects worth EUR 3,599,797.29 had passed 90 days late, plus the EUR 200,000 declared default. That is 80 of 529 projects, or 15.1%, and EUR 15,760,347.29 of EUR 99,198,497.29, or 15.9% of everything ever lent. Restrict it to vintages old enough to have finished, 2019 through 2023, and the share of capital that passed 90 days late is about 26.4%. By single vintage it runs 36.1% in 2019, 27.0% in 2020, 26.9% in 2021, 22.7% in 2022 and 28.2% in 2023. The 2024 vintage is at 7.7% so far and the 2025 and 2026 books are largely still open, so the headline 15.9% flatters the record rather than describing it. Trusters publishes none of these percentages: it publishes absolute euros and per-year shares of project count, and every figure in this paragraph is CrowdIndex arithmetic on its numbers.

• The trouble share is rising, and no single report says so. Read the three investor reports in sequence and the extra proroga share of the live book goes 16.83% at July 2023, then 20.38% at December 2023, then 27.93% at June 2025. Over the same span the declared default count stays at one. The report to 30 June 2026 is advertised behind the CrowdFundMe login, no figures from it are public, and unlike the three before it we found no trade-press write-up of it at all. Trusters also stopped replying to negative Trustpilot reviews around September 2025 after replying diligently for two years. Neither fact proves anything on its own. Together they point the same way.

• Single issuers, not single projects, are where this book breaks. The July 2023 investor report disclosed that of 17 ongoing deals in extra proroga, 12 came from just three issuers who ran their campaigns in 2020 and 2021. That is 71% of the worst cases traced to three counterparties, and it is our arithmetic on their disclosure. It is not a historical curiosity: on the two deals live on 1 September 2026, one issuer, Immobiltrade S.r.l., lists 27 initiatives and 40 raises of its own on the platform. Spreading EUR 250 tickets across twenty projects does nothing if several of them lead back to the same developer.

• The parent is loss-making, and the minority stake is in play. Entera S.p.A., which owns 58.325% of Trusters, reported a FY2025 consolidated net loss of EUR 997,311 on revenue of EUR 1,633,542, with equity falling 42% from EUR 2,359,183 to EUR 1,361,873 and cash of EUR 85,912. Management states there is no going-concern doubt. Market capitalisation was about EUR 6.1M at the end of August 2026, and the shares barely trade. Separately, the founder vehicle Digitech S.r.l. still holds about 30.53% of Trusters, with a call option in favour of the parent exercisable during 2026 after the FY2025 accounts are approved. No exercise has been announced. None of this is a solvency alarm, but recovery work on 20 stuck projects runs for years, and the group behind that work is small, loss-making and mid-reorganisation.

• No Article 20 disclosure located, and no way out before maturity. ECSPR requires an authorised lending platform to publish an annual default rate, prepared under Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/2115, in a prominent place on its website. We could not find one. The public sitemap has 23 URLs and none of them is a default-rate page, the terms and conditions do not contain the word “default”, and no such URL has ever been archived. The vintage table is not that disclosure: it cohorts by year of launch rather than in rolling twelve-month windows, gives no expected against actual comparison, no risk categories and no as-of date. An Italian competitor, Recrowd, does publish a compliant one. Absence of a public document is not proof it does not exist, and it may sit behind the login. Meanwhile the footer states the position on liquidity honestly: the investment is illiquid and no transfer to third parties is currently possible. There is a four-day cooling-off right and nothing else.

How It Works

1. Register and pass identity checks. Open an account on trusters.it and complete KYC, the anti-money-laundering identity verification, which runs through Lemonway.
2. Fund your account by bank transfer. Money sits in a Lemonway payment account, not with Trusters.
3. Pick individual deals. Each project page shows the developer, the amount sought, the rate, the term, the security and two scores: a qualitative scoring and a financial rating (the rating provider moved from Modefinance to Cerved during 2025). Minimum EUR 250, and the rate you get depends on your ticket size, from 11.00% at the bottom to 12.50% above EUR 15,000.
4. Wait for maturity. Live deals run 15 months. Most pay capital and interest together at the end, though some pay quarterly coupons. There is no secondary market, so plan on the money being gone until it comes back.
5. If the deal goes late, you join a recovery mandate. Trusters instructs an external law firm and, since 2025, says it requires real security such as mortgages on projects that fall into extra proroga. Investors have reported both that the platform advances legal costs, which its parent’s accounts confirm, and that it has asked them to contribute to costs, and that registration tax on an injunction was billed back to them individually.

Who Trusters Is For

Trusters suits an experienced Italian-speaking investor who wants exposure to Italian development finance, reads each deal individually, and treats a EUR 250 ticket as a research unit rather than a diversification unit. The site is Italian only, the deals are Italian only, and the underlying asset is something you can go and look at. The disclosure, for all the gap described above, is better than most of the Italian field: vintage-level status data and a published figure for what late deals actually paid are both rare.

It is a poor fit if you need your money back on schedule, if you cannot tolerate a fifteen-month term stretching by another seven months or more, or if you want any exit before maturity, since there is none. It is also a poor fit if you are relying on headline default statistics to size your position, because the number Trusters publishes is one project in eight years while the number of deals that have gone past 90 days late is eighty. And it does not work as a core holding: single-country, single-sector, single-currency, with repeated exposure to the same handful of developers.

Compared to Alternatives

Trusters vs. Maclear. Different regulatory worlds and different pitches. Trusters holds a genuine EU crowdfunding authorisation from Consob, with a public decision, a named legal basis and an ESMA register entry you can check; Maclear operates under a Swiss self-regulatory organisation whose remit covers anti-money-laundering compliance and not investor protection, and it is not an ECSP. On yield the gap is wide: Maclear advertises realised returns of 14.5% to 14.9%, against a 10.3% headline at Trusters that its own report cuts to 7.83% average interest on concluded deals, before Italy’s 26% tax on financial income. Neither has an investor compensation scheme. The honest split is that Trusters gives you the stronger regulatory frame and the weaker return, and both platforms have a disclosure problem at the point where a loss should be recognised: 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, so its formal recovery channel remains untested.

Trusters vs. Mintos. These are 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. Trusters is a single-country lending portal with one asset class, no secondary market, no compensation scheme and no passporting: its authorisation covers Italy alone. Mintos yields are typically 8% to 11%, so an investor is not giving up much return to get liquidity, diversification and a stronger legal frame. Anyone who wants Italian development risk specifically should hold it as a small satellite next to something like Mintos, not instead of it.

Trusters vs. Homunity. The closest structural peer we cover, and the comparison is instructive because both platforms are properly licensed real-estate lenders whose loss reporting fails at the same joint. Homunity, licensed by the French AMF and owned by the listed asset manager Tikehau Capital, prints a definitive-loss row of zero next to 175 projects and roughly EUR 309M that are more than six months late or inside insolvency proceedings, about 36% of everything it has financed. Trusters does not print the row at all, and books partial recoveries as concluded. On the raw numbers Trusters looks better, with about 15.9% of all capital and 26.4% of mature-vintage capital having passed 90 days late. It is also a much smaller operation with a much weaker parent: Homunity’s owner is a listed asset manager with EUR 507M of assets under management on that business line, Entera is a EUR 6M micro-cap that lost EUR 997,311 last year. Where Trusters is clearly ahead is on what it tells you about late deals: 2.84% average interest realised on extra-proroga exits is a number Homunity does not publish in any form.

Bottom line on competitors. Among Italian real-estate lending platforms Trusters is one of the better-documented and one of the few without a regulatory measure against it, which in that particular market is not a low bar. Judged against the wider European field it is a small, illiquid, single-country product whose published risk statistics understate its own record, sitting under a parent in the middle of a reorganisation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Trusters authorised? Yes. Consob authorised Trusters S.r.l. by delibera n. 22918 on 6 December 2023 under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503, for one service only: facilitating the granting of loans, without individual portfolio management. The entry is Active on the ESMA register with LEI 815600035CB3C1D5C877. The authorisation has not been passported, so it covers Italy only. It regulates how the platform operates. It does not protect your capital, and there is no investor compensation scheme.

What is the minimum investment? EUR 250 per project on both deals live on 1 September 2026. The rate you receive depends on ticket size: 11.00% from EUR 250, 11.50% from EUR 1,000, 12.00% from EUR 5,000 and 12.50% above EUR 15,000, with an extra 1% early-bird bonus available on tickets from EUR 1,000 that the smallest tier does not get. Some older reviews cite EUR 100; we found no platform page saying so and no dated announcement of a change.

How many Trusters projects have defaulted? By the platform’s label, one: a EUR 200,000 deal from the 2020 vintage where investors lost everything, unchanged across investor reports to July 2023, December 2023 and June 2025. By the platform’s own 90-day threshold, 80 of 529 projects have gone past it, carrying about EUR 15.8M. The difference is definitional. Trusters treats recovery that ends in a partial repayment as a concluded project, and publishes no figure at all for capital not returned. That count of 80 and its percentages are CrowdIndex arithmetic on Trusters’ published buckets, not a Trusters disclosure.

Can I sell out before maturity? No. The platform’s own footer says the financing is illiquid and that there is currently no opportunity to transfer amounts financed to third parties, and the terms list illiquidity as a named risk. There is a four-day cooling-off right after you commit, and after that the only exit is repayment, whenever it comes.

What does the change from CrowdFundMe to Entera mean for me? Little, directly. On 11 June 2026 Smart4Tech and WeAreStarting were merged into CrowdFundMe S.p.A., and on 8 July 2026 shareholders renamed it Entera S.p.A., moved its registered office from Milan to Monza, replaced the entire board with seven directors from the single list filed by Smart Capital (holder of 1,770,100 shares, about 30.974%, chaired by Laura Pedrinazzi), and replaced auditor BDO Audit Services with KPMG for 2026 to 2028. Trusters was not merged in. It remains a separate company holding its own Consob authorisation, and existing loan contracts are unchanged. What does change is who sets its priorities, and the group behind it is loss-making and mid-reorganisation.

Bottom Line

Trusters is a properly licensed Italian lending platform that publishes more than most of its domestic peers and still manages to describe its own record misleadingly. The licence is real and checkable, the vintage table is genuine disclosure, and the 2.84% average interest it reports on late exits is a figure almost nobody else in this market publishes. But the page has no loss line, partial recoveries close as successes, one deal in eight years is called a default while eighty have passed 90 days late, and the share of the live book in trouble has risen at every reading since 2023. Treat the headline default statistic as a definition rather than a track record, size any position for a 26% chance that mature-vintage capital goes past 90 days late, and check who the developer is before you check the rate, because on this platform the same few issuers keep reappearing in the bad column.

Affiliate disclosure. CrowdIndex earns a commission when readers sign up to platforms through links on this page. This does not affect our editorial assessment. Trusters is not currently an affiliate partner of CrowdIndex, and the link above goes directly to the platform. Trusters’ ranking on CrowdIndex is based on the editorial criteria documented on our Methodology page. We last reviewed this article on 1 September 2026.