Frequently Asked Questions

P2P stands for Peer to Peer lending. It enables individuals to obtain loans directly from other individuals without the involvement of any intermediary. It’s an alternate option for borrowing money other than Banks.

IndiaP2P is a NBFC-P2P, licenced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) under the name Trickle Flood Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

IndiaP2P is a NBFC-P2P, licenced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) under the name Trickle Flood Technologies Pvt. Ltd.Yes, IndiaP2P is an NBFC-P2P certified by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

IndiaP2P is a NBFC-P2P, licenced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) under the name Trickle Flood Technologies Pvt. Ltd.Yes, IndiaP2P is an NBFC-P2P certified by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).IndiaP2P is an RBI-certified platform that diligences and onboards creditworthy borrowers seeking immediate loans and connects them with lenders thereafter enabling signing of loan documents and managing disbursements and transfer of funds electronically.

As a lender on IndiaP2P, you are giving out a loan directly to borrowers who repay you with interest. Since there are no institutional intermediaries or middlemen, you earn the interest charged to a borrower minus a nominal platform fee charged by IndiaP2P.

Peer to Peer (P2P) lending is a new asset class that provides an opportunity for Investors to directly invest in one or a portfolio of loans of credit assessed and worthy Borrowers. Introduced by the RBI in 2017, P2P lending allows individual investors to access retail loans, which typically offer higher and yet stable returns.

For the past year, inflation and indicative average returns across common investment types were:

• Inflation ~ 5 to 7%
• Fixed Deposits ~ 5% </li.
• Mutual Funds ~ 12%
• Real Estate ~ 8.5 to 10%

IndiaP2P considers the data provided by credit bureaus and alternate data collected directly to arrive at a combined credit rating graded across 6 categories A to F. In the absence of credit bureau data (a good percentage of Indian adults do not have credit scores as they may be new to credit, may not have taken any credit before, etc.), only alternate data is used and this is reflected as a lower rating. IndiaP2P directly or via affiliates also physically verifies borrowers through field partners where possible. We aim to physically verify 100% of the borrowers/loans onboarded. Deviation from the same (due to COVID or other reasons) may be seen and such loans are not included in the auto-invest Growth and Income plans.

You can email us at investors@indiap2p.com or schedule a quick call with our investor support team at your convenience here

We require your KYC and tax identification information as per law. Details of additional information collected can be seen in our Privacy Policy. Please note that we do not share your information with any third parties for sale purposes.

Yes, you can invest as low as ₹5000.

As an investor you do not need to pay any upfront fee. A nominal percentage of the interest you earn every month is deducted as IndiaP2P’s fee from your earnings along with ₹250 + taxes at the end of 12 months of investment.

Yes, every investment you make is locked-in for a period of 12 months after which your principal invested (along with interest) will be repaid to you monthly. 

Pre-mature withdrawals are facilitated on a best effort basis and subject to an exit fee of 3% of the principal invested + INR 500 in facilitation fee. Your IndiaP2P investment is deployed from your escrow account into borrowers escrow accounts directly and a pre-mature withdrawal implies that an alternate investor is required for taking over the loans you have funded.  This may not always be possible or quick. 

Hence, while we do our best to facilitate early withdrawals, we request investors to consider this as a full, 12 month investment.

Please note that IndiaP2P does not 'pool investments' i.e. you have full visibility and transparency over where your investment has been deployed.

Yes, all earnings are subject to taxation. Your interest earnings on IndiaP2P will be considered as ‘other income’ in your annual returns and taxed as per your prevailing income bracket.

Using IndiaP2P Auto-Invest, you can structure your investments in loans to best suit your needs by choosing a Plan and a Risk

Category:

Plans:

Growth Plan - In the Growth Plan, an initial investment is made across a portfolio and all repayments (principal + interest) is quickly reinvested (as principal) in another portfolio of loans that match your risk profile and tenure. Thereby, giving you the power of compounding to grow your wealth. And, compounding is great!

Income Plan - In the Income Plan, an initial investment is made across a portfolio and principal repaid from monthly EMIs repaid is quickly reinvested (as principal) in another portfolio of loans that match your risk profile and tenure, while the interest earnings are credited monthly to your escrow account as income. Thereby, giving a regular interest income every month.

Risk Profile:

Conservative – The best credit-rated borrowers are listed in this category i.e. minimum risk category. Lender investors can earn up to 12% lending to borrowers in this category.

Aggressive – This category includes slightly lower credit-rated borrowers on which Lenders can earn highest returns.

Please note that IndiaP2P grades borrowers across risk ratings from A to F, with A being the highest i.e. most credit-worthy or least risky. 

Fee and Charges:

Investor onboarding fee: Nil, Pre-mature exit fee: 2% of investment amount. All withdrawals are subject to best efforts only.

Yes, you can invest in more than one plan or even add more funds to a plan you have invested in before

We offer loans of up to ₹10 lakhs across multiple categories with a maximum tenure of 36 months. Please download the IndiaP2P Borrower app if available in your geography to see all available loan offers with interest rates, tenure and more. 

IndiaP2P is a digital platform that enables you to apply conveniently and offers a variety of collateral-free loans with quick disbursements. We offer the most competitive interest rates due to direct matchmaking with lenders and low fees.

We expect all borrowers to have a clean credit history, income commensurate with loan requirement, stated purpose of loan, KYC and completion of physical verification in most cases. You can easily check eligibility via our app.

We calculate interest on a reducing balance basis.

No, we do not expect you to provide any collateral.

In most cases, borrowers receive an instant approval/rejection of their loan application. However, at times, certain additional checks are required which may delay the approval process by 2 to 5 working days.

Yes, we allow for loan pre-payment of certain loans with a nominal pre-payment charge.

Multiple lenders are likely to be funding your loan especially if the loan amount exceeds ₹50,000. However, you don’t have to repay each of them separately. Your EMIs/due repayments will be debited from your registered bank account to the IndiaP2P borrower escrow. Thereafter, we will manage credits to all lender accounts with the due proportion of your repayment.

Yes, please contact us at borrowers@indiap2p.com to change your registered account details. Please note that this change requires a re-registration of NACH mandate and thus a small fee.

No, your contact details will not be made public and neither will your photo be shown to anyone. Your identification details and other information will only be shared with the lenders who fund you at the time of agreement signing.

Please email us at borrowers@indiap2p.com

IndiaP2P focuses its loan sourcing from women borrowers that have successful prior credit histories and incomes/operating businesses.  Most loans sought are for business/income enhancement purposes and some loans for household asset purchases.

Women borrowers are known to have better credit ratings and repayment discipline.

IndiaP2P sourcing processes are designed for easy and prioritized access for women borrowers.

High-quality borrowers make for a safer investment product, which is exactly what IndiaP2P intends to do.

While we source high-quality loans, we further reduce the risk of loss from potential defaults by fractionalizing loans as explained earlier.    Fractionalizing limits exposure to a borrower and also enables your investment to be diversified over borrowers from different geographies, income sources etc. This diversification adds another layer of risk reduction on your investment.

As retail investors we have many investment options today, common ones such as stocks, MFs, rental income, etc., and newer ones such as P2P lending, angel investing, digital gold, etc.

However, not all products and companies selling those products are regulated i.e. do not have oversight of regulators such as the RBI and SEBI.  While not all unregulated investment products are unsafe, they are more prone to fraud and losses.

Before you make an investment, check if the product and/or entity providing the product is regulated.

Examples of Unregulated Investment Types: Digital Gold, Deposit Schemes, Some types of Chit Funds, Crypto etc.

Examples of Regulated Investment Types: Mutual Funds, Stocks, P2P Lending, Real Estate Investment Trusts, Bonds etc.

Regulators often explicitly ban financial advisors and registered brokers from recommending/selling unregulated assets until they come up with qualification criteria and rules for such investment assets and the companies that offer them.  These regulatory safeguards are for investor protection.

Barry Ritholtz

1. Fractions of loans - Your investment only funds a part of a loan i.e. you have co-lenders or co-investors in every loan.

2. You invest in a portfolio (of loans) i.e. your funds are spread across multiple loans so that the affect of a particular borrower defaulting is limited.  Furthermore this ‘spreading’ is done scientifically ensuring that your exposure to a geography, income source of borrower etc. are also diversified further reducing risk.

Reinvesting the earnings such as interest, dividend or capital gains into an existing or new investment to earn more is compounding.  It essentially means adding your earnings to increase your investment corpus and thereby earn on a bigger corpus.

The IndiaP2P Growth Plan puts the power of compounding to work for you by re-investing your monthly interest earnings into new loans.

The ups and downs in the price of an asset such as stocks, mutual funds, crypto, currency or gold, etc. over a time period (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) is termed as volatility.  Mathematically, volatility is measured via standard deviation around the average price of the asset.

Fixed-income investments such as bonds and IndiaP2P have low or no volatility as returns are fixed and predictable.

High volatility implies lesser predictability and more risk. However, many traders play on volatility to earn also.

A 2020 study on the S&P500 index by Crestmont Research has found that higher volatility means a higher chance of the market declining while lower volatility means a higher chance of market rising.

Asset allocation is an investing technique that involves selecting how to distribute your money among several types of types.

A few examples of asset types

1. Equities (Direct Stocks, Equity oriented Mutual funds etc)

2. Fixed Income (Fixed Deposits, debt oriented mututal funds, Provident fund etc)

3. Gold

4. Real estate

An asset allocation decision is influenced by your age, risk tolerance, and time horizon for achieving your financial goals. Asset allocation's goal is to build a portfolio of on-correlating assets that minimizes portfolio risk while maximizing profits.

P.S. IndiaP2P combines high-quality fractionalized loans into ready-to-invest portfolios, resulting in increased portfolio diversification and improved returns. 

Angel Investors are investors who typically invest in a startup in its early stages basis the idea and the credibility or promise of the entrepreneur.  In return, they receive an equity stake in the company, and often the % of the company they receive is decided later when the startup raises a larger amount of funding for an institutional investor i.e. it is linked to a formal valuation of the startup which would be done later by an institutional investor in the future.

FOMO = Fear Of Missing Out

So how do I control FOMO when others talk about the hottest coin, stock etc.?

Make it a rule to invest only in products you understand and aren’t hyped. How popular or fast-growing an investment, it does not translate it into being a good one.

The mutual fund company is managed by fund managers who take a management fee, typically ~ 2% plus other additional fees may be applicable. It’s important to check all fees before investing in a mutual fund as these are deducted from your investment or earnings.

What fund managers aim to achieve is a positive alpha i.e. deliver greater returns than the index however, negative alphas are also a reality.

India has nearly 2000 mutual fund schemes  registered with SEBI with the option of investing directly i.e. when you don’t have to go through an intermediary (advisor/broker) and regular when you do. The latter comes with some advice that may reduce risk.

It’s important that you choose a mutual fund after necessary understanding and diligence. It is also critical that you keep track of your investment as mutual funds are dependent on every changing market conditions and volatility.

Your net worth is simply the difference between your assets (what you own) and liabilities (what you owe).

IndiaP2P pro tip: Self Worth is more important than Net Worth.  Love yourself, Embrace challenges and don't fear money.

According to author Kate Northrup -  "paying attention to your money is an act of self-care."

The rule of 72 is a thumb rule to quickly estimate how many years it will take for your money to double for a given rate of return.

With IndiaP2P, you can earn up to 18%. Thereby doubling you money in 72/18 = 4.5 years.

The Icarus paradox is a book by author Daniel Miller that uses the phrase, borrowed from Greek mythology, to signify the phenomenon of why once very successful companies fail for the same factors that made them successful in the first place.

Miller states that the ‘formula’ that initially makes a company successful becomes ritualized and repeated as the company grows without introspection and analysis.  He studied Fortune 100 companies from the 1960s and found that only 19 of them continued on the list 4 decades later, In fact, two-thirds of them no longer existed. 

While it may seem obvious that organisations must adapt their ‘winning formula’, Miller analyses and explains why that is a lot harder than it seems and many of the factors at play that make it harder in large companies are also at play in smaller businesses.

Further research on this paradox has been conducted by many noted experts such as Prof. Drummond who found that intensification of IT systems i.e. making even complex decisions purely IT and data-driven has led to the downfall of organisations.

Tips on earnings, investments, and savings.

First of all, we must understand that any cash sitting with us is decreasing in value due to inflation and investing smartly becomes all the more important.

February 2022,  WPI and CPI inflation rates in India are 13.1% and 6.1% respectively.

3.  Try to estimate your personal inflation rate and make changes to your expense patterns to reduce it.  You can do this by simply comparing your expenses on c regular items between two time periods.

4.  Seek a raise, increase the price of your time/service in line with inflation

On the other hand, non-productive assets such as gold, art/NFTs and many crypto tokens do not produce any return, they purely change in value due to demand-supply and nothing else.  For these types of assets, the returns are pinned on the hope that more people will want it in the future i.e. demand will be much higher than today.

Real return on investment = Returns Generated - Inflation

February 2022 inflation in India -  WPI and CPI are 13.1% and 6.1% respectively.

We often ignore the impact of inflation on our investments. In times of high inflation, some of your investments may be giving negative real returns.

The term Illusion of Control was coined by psychologist Ellen Langer after identifying how people often tend to overestimate their ability to control events. A good part of this is due to the fact that we often tend to confuse between skill and chance events and start seeing connections or causality where there isn’t any.

For example, in investing, we may be picking stocks without proper diligence during a bull run and attribute the increase in value to our ‘skill’ at choosing stocks.  Leading us to overestimate our abilities and give us an ‘illusion of control over the value change of our chosen stocks.

However, this rise in value is likely to have occurred with a majority of stocks anyway and has nothing to do with our skills. Overconfidence in our skills or sense of control over the outcome of our investments may lead to losses when the overall circumstances aren’t conducive.

“Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only in his failure.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Loss Aversion is the phenomenon where say a loss of Rs 100 hurts a lot more than the joy of an unexpected gain of Rs. 100 would bring us.  

In fact, studies in psychology have suggested that losses are 2x more impactful than gains this leads us to make some very irrational investing decisions as well. For example:

-    Refusing to sell an asset (stock, property, crypto etc.) when all analysis and price trends tell us that it is a bad investment heading towards worse. This irrational refusal is also attributed to our          perception that it is not a loss until we sell i.e. realize it.

The concept  Time Value of Money says that Rs. 100 today is more valuable than the same amount at a time in the future.  

This decline in the value of future money is due to the potential earnings you can generate by investing today.

Simply put, Rs.100 invested productively is likely to be worth more in the future, say Rs, 120.  But, if not invested, it stays at Rs. 100.  This hypothetical difference of Rs. 20 is the Time Value of Money in this case.

The  different values we as people put on the same amount of money based on subjective or emotional criteria is our personal mental accounting.  This type of accounting may seem useful or in the very least harmless but it is simply bad for us.

Mental Accounting has been studied and popularised by behavioral economist Richard Thaler. He says that we tend to ‘mentally classify’ money even though money is just money (i.e. its fungible), leading to both irrational spending and irrational investments. 

For most of us, money received unexpectedly is always considered more spendable or put in the ‘can afford to risk’ category.  In reality, money categorised as ‘can afford to risk’ and money categorised otherwise/for safekeeping/monthly budget, etc. should be treated with the same diligence.

The level of risk is the main difference between investing and speculating. While investing requires digesting data and evidence to to understand the underlying assets risks and return potential often seeking assets that are relatively low risk and often lower return in the short term. Speculation, on the other hand means putting your money in assets or trades that are expected to deliver high returns in short to medium-term; this expectation of high return comes with high risk too.

Professional speculators understand this high-risk high-return scenario and use advanced risk management tools while also preparing for high losses.

This bias toward over-valuing assets and items (or investments) we already own is called the ‘endowment bias’ or the endowment effect as coined by economist Richard Thaler.

Asset allocation is an investing technique that involves selecting how to distribute your money among several types of assets.

A few examples of asset types

1. Equities (Direct Stocks, Equity oriented Mutual funds etc)

2. Fixed Income (Fixed Deposits, debt-oriented mutual funds, Provident fund etc)

3. Gold

4. Real estate

An asset allocation decision is influenced by your age, risk tolerance, and time horizon for achieving your financial goals. Asset allocation's goal is to build a portfolio of on-correlating assets that minimises portfolio risk while maximising profits.

P.S. IndiaP2P combines high-quality fractionalized loans into ready-to-invest portfolios, resulting in increased portfolio diversification and improved returns.