Kuflink – My Review of the Peer-to-Peer Lending Platform

I started to invest in Kuflink at their minimum investment of £1k in July 2020. I started small with a number of platforms as I was brand new to property crowdfunding at that point. I added £9k in March 2021 and further topped it up with £5k in March and £7k in April 2024. My total balance with Kuflink is currently £20,104. Below is Kuflink review and reports on returns after 4 years investing with this Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending platform.

Kuflink is one of my favourite platforms to date with a high return and relatively lower risk. It is good for “lazy” investors who don’t want to spend a huge amount of time in researching and selecting investments.   

Returns

My key considerations when looking at P2P lending platform are always risks and returns. Kufflink is one of the platforms with the highest return rates. My current average blended annualised rate of return is 8.71%.

Risks

Considering the loan default and platform risks, I would give Kuflink a better risk rating than many other property crowdfunding platforms out there.  

Loan default risks:

▪ All loans are secured by UK property.

▪ Kuflink invest 5% of their own capital into loans on a “first loss” basis giving extra protection to investors.

▪ The loan-to-value is relatively low, which makes it easier to recover investment should defaults occur (currently at the blended rate of 62.2%).

▪ The platform has a good loan repayment history. They have lent £325m, £219m of which has been repaid with no losses incurred to date.

Platform risks:

▪ Kufflink has been profitable since 2020 with independently audited accounts since 2014.

▪ It is a family-owned business with extensive lending experience. I quite like the fact that they made an effort to gain three awards: “CEO of the Year” (for the current CEO Narinder Khattoare), “Investors’ Choice” and “Bridging Lender of the Year” in the P2P Finance Awards 2022.

▪ The Trust Pilot rating is 4.5 by 1,135 ratings.

▪ The website has a good list of reasons to persuade investors that they are a good reliable platform.

“Lazy Investor” Rating

Kuflink auto invest offers good fixed rate products with low blended loan-to-value, which means I don’t have to do much of the self-select options. As I have a full-time job and only do investments as a side hobby at the moment, this is a big factor for me. An example of the current offer is in the screenshot below:

Customer support

Generally, I have been very happy with Kuflink’s customer support. There was one occasion when my one-year investment was automatically rolled into the one-year product of 7% while the two-year product at that time was much more attractive at 10%. I only discovered this after 3 weeks. I sent the customer support team a request to switch my investment to the higher rate and they helpfully resolved it for me.  

Other considerations

I have only recently found out that Kuflink has a charitable foundation to help local community. This is definitely a plus for me.

One of the cons that other reviews refer to is the lack of easy exit option. They currently charge 0.25% per loan seller fee on secondary market and investors can only buy secondary market loans in fixed sums. This is less of a concern for me given the lower platform risk and I don’t anticipate using this option.

They don’t have the provision fund to cover bad debts, however, this is made up for by the Kuflink’s 5% own capital to cover the first loss.

The platform is very user-friendly. After you sign up, similar to other platforms, there will be a number of questions you need to go through to confirm that you understand the risks involved in investing in peer-to-peer lending. The platform doesn’t currently offer any cashback on sign up.