Capsphere Peer-to-Peer Lending: Conventional and Islamic Options with Referral Code IjUa3E

Capsphere is a little known p2p (peer to peer) lending player in Malaysia. The big 3 in Malaysia's p2p lending players are Funding Societies, Fundaztic and Capbay. However the company has been making some improvements on their operation and is now gearing up to have more notes and get more retail investors onboard.

Capsphere differentiates itself from other p2p player by having all it's notes having collateral and hence dubbing themselves as Malaysia's 1st asset based p2p financing platform. The company started financing to companies that want to purchase assets while securing the assets as collateral. Borrowers need to have some for of assets as collateral to apply for loans. These assets can be real estate property, cars, machinery, lorry, medical equipment, computer servers etc. In the event of a default, Capsphere will attempt to recover the loans by liquidating the collateral and claim the outstanding amount through legal means.

I've been one of the earlier users of Capsphere since its pilot launching. The company has got normal conventional notes and also Shariah compliant notes.

The notes listed have short to long tenures from 4 months to 2 years. The Shariah compliant notes are shown with the moon and star symbol. The minimum amount to put into notes starts at RM50 only, quite similar to Fundaztic but one good point is its notes are much shorter than the notes listed on Fundaztic. Generally, the longer the tenure, the higher the risk.

Information about borrower is detailed on each of the notes. PNL (Profit and Loss) statement and repayment schedules are also detailed in the notes.

There's also auto invest option for those super busy people. Basically you setup a set of rules and set your funds will be automatically invested in notes that fit your rules/criteria. However I do not recommend this to be turned on and prefer to manually scrutinize all notes manually.

For techies, Capsphere offers 2FA authentication to secure the logins. This means that having the user id and password to login to Capsphere is still not enough, users still need to do 2nd level approvals.

Do note that Capsphere has an operating license given by Securities Commissions Malaysia.

I'm still considered a small investor on this platform as subscribed notes are only 13 (on-going) and total profit for 2 years is around only RM100. So far I've not experience any default yet on this platform. I'm investing only in the 4 months -12 months tenure notes for now and also just putting in RM50-RM100 per note to manage my risk. I also scrutinize the notes details about the lender's profits and any red flags (litigation cases/credit ratings) mentioned in the notes description. Even with a collagenized note, defaults are still risky as the collagenized asset might have dropped in value, spoiled, gone missing, have a caveat claim by another institution (eg banks) and the long legal process of recovery, it is extremely important to scrutinized and select only the best of class notes. Try to avoid company that are started within 1-2 years as commercial banks won't borrow out to companies that operated less than 3 years. The main point I want to put out is, before putting into any notes, always use critical thinking and think like a banker before putting your hard earned savings to a note.

Do note that I am not affiliated with the company and all my opinions are just my personal observations and experience using the app. P2P lending is risky stuff and there are many unlicensed P2P lending operators who offer much higher returns but many end up as money game Ponzi scams.