Terrible Lending Platform
In this article, I’ll discuss SoLo Funds, a prominent P2P lending platform. I’ll explain why you should stay away from this shady platform while also sharing the reviews of its customers.
Peer-to-peer lending platforms are relatively new in the industry. They are becoming increasingly popular because they help people in numerous ways. However, like every industry, the P2P lending industry has the danger of scams too.
Sadly, this company seems like one of those scams. Here’s a quick summary of my SoLo Funds review:
SoLo Funds provides no safety to lenders, has a non-existent customer support, and has caused many people to lose money. It is not recommended to do business with this shady platform.
What is SoLo Funds
It is a peer-to-peer lending platform. Here, you can borrow funds from other people for a short-term. There’s an upper limit of $1,000 on the amount a person can borrow on this platform. Apart from that, you get 14 to 30 days maximum to repay the loan.
This company digitised the peer-to-peer lending process, and that’s why it has gotten much popular among consumers. The UI of the SoLo Funds is very easy to use and learn, which gives it an advantage as well.
However, a fancy-looking UI isn’t the primary reason why someone would use this platform.
Its main purpose is to help lenders and borrowers perform transactions on a digital platform. And it has multiple severe issues in that regard. Due to those issues, I don’t recommend this platform to any lender or borrower.
I have elaborated on its problems in the later sections of this article. Here, I’ll explain what it is and how people use it.
How to Signup on SoLo Funds
The sign up process at this platform is very quick. It’s one of the few reasons why it seems like an attractive P2P lending platform. To sign up, you first have to download the SoLo Funds app from Google Play or the App Store.
Then a user can sign in with their Google or Facebook account, enter the required details (full name, email confirmation, address, etc.), and the process completes.
Users have the option of connecting their bank account with the app so they can borrow or lend funds through it.
As you can see, signing up on this platform is very quick and simple. I’d say that’s a good quality. However, if they would’ve kept their platform as theri sign up process, things would’ve been different.
Highlights of SoLo Funds
Here are the primary features of this company:
Charges No Interest
The most prominent highlight of this company is it doesn’t charge any interest on its loans. So if you’re the borrower, you’d only have to pay the amount you had received and nothing more. It makes SoLo Funds seem inexpensive on paper, but that’s not the case.
Here, a borrower can add a tip to stand out among lenders. These tips increase the price of the loan as much as a normal payday loan. You’d have to pay the tip to the lender within the duration of your loan as well.
For example, if you take out a $100 loan with a $10 tip, it would cost nearly as much as a usual payday loan because they charge around $10 to $15 per $100.
Gives No Guarantees to Lenders
Lenders face a huge risk of getting negative returns on their investments while using this platform. If you’re an investor then I wouldn’t recommend using this platform at all. Although I have discussed this problem later in the article too, it requires reiteration.
This company doesn’t assure any repayments and the worst it can do in case your borrower defaults, is ban that user from using this platform. This means, even in the worst case, you won’t get your money back.
Requires No Credit Checks
This platform has its own rating system to show the credibility of a borrower. It doesn’t use your credit rating. This can be a great thing as well as a bad one. If you have a bad credit score, it wouldn’t matter on this platform.
As a lender, you would have to rely on the their exclusive system of determining reliability of borrowers.
Only Short-term Loans
You can only borrow amounts ranging from $50 to $1,000 on this platform. Apart from that, you can get the maximum duration of 30 days to pay off the loan. The minimum duration it provides is 14 days.
So if you were looking for a solution to solve your long-term financial problems, this is not the platform for you.
No Live Customer Support
For a P2P lending platform, SoLo Funds fails to provide live customer support to its users. While researching for this article, I found that many user complaints were regarding the poor customer service they received from this company.
Sometimes the support staff can take weeks to respond to a simple query or complaint. This is a prominent issue and the company should work on it.
Why SoLo Funds is Bad For You
It might seem like a great peer-to-peer lending platform considering it has been operating for some years. However, it has many flaws that make it a terrible choice for you whether you’re an investor or a borrower. In the following subsections, you’ll see why it’s bad for lenders and borrowers respectively.
Lender Issues in SoLo Funds
Since April 2019, SoLo Funds removed any kind of safety net for its lenders. This means, if you lend money to a peer through this platform and the borrower defaults there’s no assurance of getting your money back.
While every investment has some risk of giving negative return, the risk here is very substantial in comparison to others. This is a big reason why I don’t recommend this company to lenders. The policies of this platform are flawed. Moreover, when you consider the SoLo Funds investor reviews, you see that many lenders are already facing problems in getting positive returns.
SoLo Funds doesn’t have any safety net for lenders. You give money to your peers at your own risk.
Borrower Issues in SoLo Funds
SoLo Funds has some serious problems when it comes to borrowers. First, failing to repay a loan on SoLo Funds hurts your actual credit score. So even though SoLo Funds doesn’t check your credit score while helping you get the loan, it can hurt your credit score if you don’t repay a loan.
The second issue is that the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) doesn’t require lenders to check a person’s ability to repay a loan while giving them one. This could put you in a cycle of debts.
When I checked SoLo Funds reviews, I found many borrowers complaining about facing technical issues. Apparently, SoLo Funds is unreliable when it comes to processing payments.
This causes delays in payments and it can be very dangerous because it puts your credit rating at risk. The technical faults of this platform can damage your credit rating, which will affect your chances of getting loans in the future along with other things. It is a prominent danger due to which SoLo Funds is not a reliable platform for borrowers as well.
Failing to repay a loan in SoLo Funds damages your credit score. Moreover, customers complain about technical issues which delay their payments on SoLo Funds so they default automatically and have to pay additional fees.
SoLo Funds Investor Reviews
A prominent reason why I don’t recommend using SoLo Funds in my review is because of its reputation among its customers. There are too many complaints against SoLo Funds online. In this section of my article, I’ll share several SoLo Funds investor reviews, so you can see why this company isn’t the right one for you:
It has potential but needs more work
This reviewer was an avid user of the SoLo Funds app. They gave around $16,000 to 60 different individuals while they used this platform. According to them, this platform has many flaws for lenders which make it a bad choice for investors. This person had a very difficult time dealing with the borrowers on the platform.
Most of their loans rolled over, i.e. the borrower got additional 14 days to repay the loan. For a short-term loan that only lasted for 14-30 days, an additional period of 14 days seems too much to this review. In their opinion, an additional period of 7 days would be sufficient for such loans.
This person gave another suggestion to SoLo Funds. The company can add the provision of overdrafting the borrower’s account in case they fail the repayment. The primary problem this reviewer had with SoLo Funds was regarding the collections system.
This platform sends the defaulted loans to collections, on which this person made a genuine observation that it’s very difficult for a person to pay a few hundred dollars in collections.
This review also complains about the customer support of SoLo Funds. Apparently, the customer service takes a few weeks to respond to queries and complaints, which is a long time. The lack of live customer support is another huge downside of this platform, which this reviewer has discussed as well.
It’s like throwing your money in trash
This person had used the SoLo Funds app in 2018 and had received a delayed repayment. However, they started using it in 2020 and gave two loans which amounted to a few hundred dollars. Even though both of their loans are in collections, SoLo Funds charged a recovery fee on their amount. This person also complained about the non-existent customer support.
SoLo Funds’s team didn’t even notify them that their loans had gone into collections. They had to find that out themselves.
This person also shared concerns regarding the numerous positive ratings SoLo Funds has and raised questions on their authenticity. It’s possible for a platform like SoLo Funds to reward its customers for writing positive reviews about it.
Requires more transparency
This is another person whose lent money through this platform only to find that their funds had gone into collections. Apparently, their loan stayed in collections for months and there seems no chance of getting a repayment now.
Their main complaint is regarding the SoLo Funds app. The app doesn’t provide dates so it’s quite difficult to find out when you issue a loan. Similarly, the app fails to give any updates on the loan’s status.
Lack of transparency is a sign of a scam. I’m not saying SoLo Funds is a scam, but the way their app provides little to no information to its users, they seem like a scam.
This company is a SCAM!
This complaint claims that SoLo Funds is a scam. They had lent some funds through this app. When they didn’t get the repayment on time, they contacted the company, which said there was nothing to worry about. However, this person later discovered that they would have to pay an additional fee to get their money back. The whole complaint is very sad to read.
They complained that they had bills to pay while SoLo Funds was getting away with stealing from them.
The company responded to this complaint however, their response was unsatisfactory for the reviewer. Moreover, it took them around 10 days to reply to this complaint, which is another proof of their terrible customer support.
It has shady business practices
In this complaint, the person suspected that this company has shady policies for lenders. This person had lent money to others through this platform and they faced problems in getting updates about them. They waited for 6 months but didn’t get any updates from the company regarding their outstanding loans.
Like the other complaints I have shared here, this person faced problems with the customer support as well. They also pointed out the lack of transparency present on the platform.
SoLo Funds is One-sided
This person summed up my entire article within a few paragraphs. They had given a $110 loan to someone through SoLo Funds but even after waiting for weeks, they didn’t receive a repayment.
In fact, they got a notification from SoLo Funds that they have deducted 30% from their principal amount as a collection fee. As I pointed out earlier, it’s a very shady business model because this way, SoLo Funds makes money when lenders don’t get a repayment on time.
This person questioned this business model and demanded a refund of their loan. The company gave an automated response to this review but the customer indicated that they were not satisfied with the response at all.
They also complained about losing the entire tip they were promised at the time of lending the funds.
There were many other investor complaints on this company. You must’ve noticed how everyone in these complaints lost their investment because of this company.
Investors complain about shady business practices, lack of transparency, and a bias for borrowers on SoLo Funds. Many people have lost the money they lent to others through SoLo Funds.
SoLo Funds Review: Conclusion
SoLo Funds has terrible policies and a slow customer support. The platform lacks transparency and makes it difficult for lenders to get positive returns on their investments.
Numerous investors have lost their money through SoLo Funds, and the number of complaints against this platform is constantly increasing. Because this company makes money when a person defaults on a loan, it makes it a risky tool for both borrowers and lenders.
I hope this review helped you in seeing the truth behind this lending platform. If you know someone who might benefit from reading it, please share it with them.
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