Is mutual lending mutually beneficial?

The P2P lending market (aka crowdfunding, equal investment, or a social loan) is a fairly capacious alternative to both classical bank lending and microfinance organizations. 

The workflow of such credit platform is quite simple: users invest their money, and the system distributes it among those who are in need of it, fixing a percentage depending on the solvency of the borrower. The former receive income if the latter timely fulfill their debt obligations.

Dmitry Shepelev, Project manager at SimplyFi, notes that crowdfunding is the fastest growing lending segment. While in 2016 only about 6 billion rubles were issued through the platform, in 2017 this figure already amounted to more than 11 billion rubles. At the end of 2018, the volume of issuance reached more than 15 billion rubles.