Esketit Review

Esketit is a marketplace for loan claims, built by the founders of the lending group Creamfinance, now known as AvaFin. From €10 you buy assigned claims and receive in return the originator's buyback obligation should a borrower fail to pay for more than 60 days. p2p-investments.de rates Esketit D (4.6/10). The advertised return genuinely arrives in investors' portfolios, the platform charges no fees, and a large share of the loans is secured. Pulling the grade down are the structures behind it: no financial licence, no group guarantee for a single one of its originators, and a move to Croatia that cut off existing investors' early exit in 2025. How this grade comes about is laid out in our rating methodology.

What is Esketit and who is the platform for?

Esketit mediates claims on loans issued by eight originators in Latvia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. Since October 2025 the platform has been operated by Esketit Platform d.o.o. in Zagreb; the predecessor company, Esketit Platform Limited in Dublin, continues to exist alongside it. Behind both stand Dāvis Barons and Matīss Ansviesulis, who built Creamfinance in 2012. Since launching in December 2020, investors have bought claims worth €1,005 million through the platform and been paid out €19.74 million in interest.

Interest bands range from 7 % on mortgage-secured loans to 13 % on consumer loans from Malaysia, the entry point is €10, and Esketit charges no fees anywhere. That fits investors who want a double-digit return and accept in exchange that no authority watches over the platform and that an early exit depends on the secondary market. If you're after regulated structures and segregated custody that someone actually verifies, our platform comparison lists licensed providers such as Mintos.

How does Esketit work?

The model is a claim assignment. An originator issues the loan, funds it itself at first, and then assigns you the resulting claim. Legally, you therefore hold not a loan but a payment claim, documented by an electronically concluded assignment agreement in your user profile. Interest accrues from the day the contract is concluded, calculated as days divided by 365, times the interest rate, times the purchase price. You can invest by hand, through a self-configured auto-invest, or through the variant where Esketit sets every parameter except your maximum amount.

If a borrower fails to pay for more than 60 calendar days, the buyback obligation kicks in and the originator takes the claim back together with accrued interest. Until it is invested, your deposited balance sits in an account that the terms of use describe as kept separate from the platform's own assets. For an insolvency, clause 26 provides that assignment agreements remain valid and that administration may pass to a third party. Who that third party would be is never named, and nobody audits the segregation of funds.

What sets Esketit apart from other marketplaces is how closely platform and originators are intertwined. Five of the eight originators are listed on the originator page as "Owned by Founders" - meaning they belong to the same people who own the platform. That aligns interests, but it also bundles platform, credit and guarantor risk into a single circle. When the same owners run the marketplace, issue the loans and promise the buyback, your protection hangs on one balance-sheet group.

What kinds of loans are on Esketit?

The offering has shifted substantially. In the AvaFin era, short-term consumer loans dominated; today four of the eight originators issue business loans at 11 to 12 % (Spanda Capital, JMD Investments, MDI Finance, Mojo Capital) and two issue mortgage-secured loans at 7 % (A24 Group and Credus Capital). On top come vehicle-secured loans from Jet Finance in Kazakhstan at 10 % and consumer loans from Nimbura in Malaysia at 13 %.

One figure on the originator page is easy to misread. The "Total loans issued" column, €84.8 million for Jet Finance, is the originator's own cumulative lending, not the volume funded through Esketit; Jet Finance separately reports its own portfolio of around $100 million. How much investor money actually sits with which originator is nowhere published, and for Spanda Capital the column is missing entirely.

For you as an investor, this shift cuts both ways. More of the book is secured than before, and two originators even publish their loan-to-value ratios: Jet Finance a typical LTV of up to 80 % on vehicles that all carry a GPS tracker, Credus Capital under 70 % on independently appraised properties. No such figure exists for the A24 Group. At the same time, the offering is thinner: the curves for published and funded loan volume on the statistics page sit well below 2024 levels. So far this has barely shown up in cash drag: portfolios tracked on P2P Dash sit at a median 3.7 % uninvested capital.

The move to Croatia and what it changed for existing investors

On 6 October 2025, Esketit announced it would move operations to Croatia on 15 October - about nine days' notice. Anyone who accepted the new user agreement switched to the Croatian company. Accounts under the Irish company have since run on "limited functionality": statements and withdrawal of free balances remain possible, while the primary market, secondary market, deposits and the auto-strategies' cash-out were switched off. Capital already invested there only comes back at maturity.

It's worth noting where Esketit spells this out precisely and where it doesn't. The FAQ calls existing investments "completely safe" and says they would be "transferred automatically to the new Platform in Croatia"; that this requires consent appears two entries further down, as does the fact that without consent you end up with "limited functionality". Which functions that covers is never stated there. Only the blog post names them: primary and secondary market, deposits, and the auto-strategies' cash-out - precisely the routes by which you would exit early.

On top of that comes a clause printed in the footer of every page: the Croatian and Irish companies are legally separate, cannot bind one another, and each is liable only for its own actions. A claim against the Irish company is therefore not a claim against the Croatian one. For judging the platform, that sentence matters more than any return figure.

Is Esketit regulated?

No, and Esketit says so itself. The footer of every page reads: "Esketit is not regulated under any financial services licence." There is neither a MiFID licence as an investment firm nor an authorisation under the EU Crowdfunding Regulation, of the kind held by, say, Twino or Crowdpear. What such an authorisation actually delivers is explained in our article on the ECSP licence.

A look at the register shows how thinly the operating company is set up. Esketit Platform d.o.o. is entered in the Croatian commercial register under MBS 081526038 with activity code 62.90.0 - an ordinary IT service provider, not a financial-services entity - with share capital of €2,500 and its registered office at Strojarska cesta 20 in Zagreb. The notes to its 2025 financial statement, filed with the Croatian financial agency FINA, state plainly that the company had no equity on the reporting date. Against that stand €133,069 in long-term liabilities, on total income of €41,664 and a net loss for the year of €97,054, up from €3,140 the year before. There are no reserves to absorb the loss, so it is carried forward.

Two caveats belong here. This company has only carried the platform operation since mid-October 2025; before that it was dormant, so the statement doesn't cover a full year of operations. And zero employees doesn't mean nobody works: personnel expense doesn't appear at all, but €94,312 in cost of materials does - the services are evidently bought in. Who provides them isn't stated in the accounts.

In practice this means: no authority to force payouts or order an orderly wind-down in a crisis, and no compensation pot of the kind a licensed investment firm such as Mintos brings along. Segregation of funds is contractually promised, but nobody audits it. Esketit has announced since July 2025 that it is taking "important steps toward licensing our operations", but names neither a regulator nor a timeline.

How we rate Esketit

Returns are the only genuinely strong point here. Everything to do with protection and verifiability drags the grade down. The reasoning per criterion, as of August 2026:

Safety & regulation (3/10). No licence, and the operating company carries €2,500 in share capital and zero employees. On the plus side: an ownership structure that checks out in the register, segregated account-keeping promised in the terms of use along with an insolvency provision, and loan-to-value ratios published by two originators. Counterparty quality also varies sharply: on Jet Finance, the originator page states the company is licensed in Kazakhstan as a microfinance organisation, is audited by Grant Thornton, issues bonds on the KASE exchange and carries a B− from Fitch. That, however, is Esketit's own account of its counterparty, not cross-checked against a supervisory register, and nothing comparable exists for the five founder-owned originators. Because Esketit also doesn't disclose how much investor money sits with which originator, the well-documented slice of the portfolio carries no real weight. The originator page shows a group guarantee for none of the eight.

Transparency (4/10). On fees and ownership, Esketit is stronger than most competitors: the fees page is complete, and the originator page states openly where a group guarantee is missing. Against that stands something more fundamental. Neither company has an audited financial statement, and Esketit does not publish default or recovery statistics. The loan-status charts show 100.00 % "Current" for six originators - not proof of a default-free book, but a consequence of the buyback: once a loan is 60 days overdue, it leaves the portfolio before it could ever show up as a default in a statistic. The chart is missing entirely for Jet Finance and JMD Investments, while four originators that withdrew long ago still run alongside with empty values. On top of that, the homepage still advertises being "the only consumer lender in Europe with a large public bank as a strategic shareholder", even though AvaFin - and with it the link to Capitec Bank - has had nothing to do with the platform's business since 2025.

Track record & stability (5/10). Roughly five and a half years with investor money and just over €1 billion in mediated volume speak for the platform; no failed buybacks or investor losses are publicly documented. Set against that is a self-inflicted upheaval. The anchor originator AvaFin announced its withdrawal from P2P funding in June 2025, after Capitec Bank had taken it over and begun funding it directly from May 2025. Published loan volume has fallen markedly since, the operating company posted a loss for 2025, and in July 2025 the CEO changed: Vitālijs Zalovs stepped down and stayed on as an advisor, Ieva Grigaļūne took over, and a newly created legal role was added.

Returns & terms (7/10). The strongest point. The advertised 11.87 % and a median of 11.5 % net XIRR across real portfolios sit unusually close together, and there genuinely are no investor fees, not even on the secondary market. The deduction comes from the relationship between return and risk: PeerBerry pays 11.0 % backed by a group guarantee, and the licensed Mintos and Twino each pay 10.0 %. For that narrow edge, you carry a markedly thinner safety net here. How return and risk relate to each other across the market is covered in our article on the returns and risks of P2P lending.

Investor-friendliness & liquidity (6/10). The €10 entry point, two auto-invest variants and a fee-free secondary market where interest keeps accruing until sale are well executed. Against that stand an English-only interface, no tax report tailored to the German Anlage KAP, support only by email Monday to Friday, and the 2025 experience that liquidity is operationally granted, not contractually guaranteed.

Data availability and open questions

Unusual for an unregulated platform: almost everything behind this rating comes from registers and from Esketit itself. 23 of 25 review questions could be answered from solid sources - the commercial register, FINA filings, the terms of use, and the fees, originator and statistics pages - which puts data availability: good.

Two gaps remain, and both sit exactly where the money does. First, Esketit does not publish a quantified originator skin-in-the-game, so it stays open how much of their own money originators hold in each loan. Second, evidence quality varies enormously between originators: for Jet Finance there are audited financial statements, a Fitch rating and a supervisor; for the five founder-owned originators, none of that exists. How resilient their buyback promises would prove in a real crisis is something you cannot quantify from outside, and for them the protection of your investment rests on that alone. A published maturity range is also missing, which is why none is stated here.

Esketit experiences from the P2P community

The most solid picture comes from P2P Dash, where 326 Esketit investors link their real portfolios. The median sits at 11.5 % net XIRR, based on 242 evaluated portfolios, with the middle half between 10.8 and 12.4 %, and a cash drag of 3.7 % (as of 9 August 2026). The advertised order of magnitude genuinely does arrive in investors' portfolios.

Praised above all are this genuinely delivered return, the low entry point and the absence of fees. Criticised is almost exclusively the restructuring: the short notice before the Croatia move, the secondary market switched off for existing investors, and communication that only spelled out the consequences late.

This criticism shows up in the numbers. Of the investors who state a strategy on P2P Dash, 50 % want to reduce their holding or exit entirely, and only 33 % plan to keep building. Solid interest income and eroding trust pull apart here, and this picture matches our rating: strong on return, weak on structure. Individual accounts, however, are no proof of durably achievable returns and replace neither diversification nor your own due diligence.

Who is Esketit for?

Esketit suits experienced P2P investors who want a small, deliberate allocation with a double-digit return and accept the missing oversight as the price for it. Anyone who invests should do so through the Croatian company to keep the secondary market and withdrawals, and should factor in that liquidity can change again, as it did in 2025.

Despite the €10 minimum, the platform is not suited to getting started in P2P. Without oversight, without audited originator figures and without a group guarantee, you need to be able to judge these risks yourself; the basics are covered in our article P2P lending: the basics. How heavily a single platform should be weighted at all is covered in diversification in P2P lending. Put in only money whose temporary or total loss you can absorb.

If you want to try Esketit despite these open issues, start with a small amount you won't need for a year or two, and invest deliberately through the Croatian company. You reach the platform via our investment link; it comes with a 1 % bonus on your investments, capped at €1,000. Where Esketit stands in the wider market is shown by our platform comparison.