Peer-to-peer lending in Singapore lets you fund loans to small businesses and earn the interest the borrower pays, minus the platform's cut. As a retail investor in 2026 the comparison comes down to two names: Funding Societies and Minterest take small amounts, while Validus and most newer names are open only to accredited investors. Headline rates of 8% to 18% a year sound great, but those are gross figures before the platform fee and before defaults. The return that lands in your pocket is lower and never guaranteed. P2P sits at the high-risk end of fixed income, not next to a fixed deposit, and none of it is covered by deposit insurance. This guide compares what the main platforms actually pay, what you can access, and the risks MAS makes them spell out before you put money in.
In peer-to-peer lending you lend money to a borrower, usually a Singapore SME, through an online platform that matches both sides, runs the credit checks and collects repayments. The borrower pays interest; you receive your share of that interest plus your principal back over the loan term. The platform keeps a fee for running the show. In Singapore this is one form of what MAS calls securities-based crowdfunding, because the loan you fund is legally a debt security.
It helps to be clear about what P2P is not. It is not a deposit. There is no bank standing behind it, no fixed rate locked in for the term, and the Singapore Deposit Insurance Scheme does not cover it. If a borrower stops paying, you can lose part or all of that loan, and the platform is under no obligation to make you whole. The right mental frame is a small slice of high-yield, unsecured corporate credit, not a savings product. If you want a government-backed home for cash you might actually need, T-bills or Singapore Savings Bonds are a different category entirely.
Returns come in two flavours depending on the product. Invoice financing and business term loans carry the highest rates, often quoted at 8% to 18% a year, because they are short and unsecured. Property-backed or secured notes pay less, roughly 4% to 8%, because there is collateral reducing the platform's loss if the borrower defaults. Higher headline rate almost always means higher risk of not seeing the money back.
Most coverage of Singapore P2P still lists five or six names, but several of them no longer take ordinary retail money or have wound down their retail offering. For a regular investor without accredited status, the practical choices are Funding Societies and Minterest. Both are MAS-licensed, both accept small ticket sizes, and both lend mainly to local SMEs.
Funding Societies is the largest by volume. It lets you invest from S$20 per note once you have funded your account, with a S$100 initial deposit to get started. Returns depend on the product: property-backed secured notes are advertised around 4% to 8% a year, while invoice financing, revolving credit and business term loans run 8% to 18% a year. The platform takes 18% of the interest you earn as its service fee (inclusive of GST), deducted after the borrower repays. Its reported default rate has historically been low single digits, around 1% to 2%, though that moves with the credit cycle and your own portfolio can be worse than the platform average.
Minterest accepts investments from S$50 per campaign, with a minimum of S$1,000 transferred into its escrow account to begin. It focuses on shorter tenures, typically up to 12 months, across SME corporate financing and real estate-linked deals. Its fee is 15% of interest earned, lower than Funding Societies, and the default rate it has reported sits around 1.6%. The lower fee does not automatically mean a better net return, because the gross rate, default experience and how much you can actually deploy all matter more than the headline cut.
| Feature | Funding Societies | Minterest |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum per note | S$20 | From S$50 |
| Initial deposit | S$100 | S$1,000 |
| Gross return (financing) | 8% to 18% p.a. | Up to ~18% p.a. |
| Gross return (secured/property-backed) | 4% to 8% p.a. | Varies by deal |
| Typical tenure | Short to medium term | Up to 12 months |
| Platform fee | 18% of interest earned | 15% of interest earned |
| Reported default rate | ~1% to 2% | ~1.6% |
| Open to retail | Yes | Yes |
A chunk of the Singapore P2P market is walled off behind accredited investor status. Validus, one of the older SME lenders, lends only to accredited and institutional investors and holds a Capital Markets Services licence from MAS; its lending opportunities are commonly described as requiring minimums in the tens of thousands, around S$50,000, and the platform takes its own cut of the interest. Confirm the current minimum and fee on the platform itself before committing, as these are not standardised across deals. Several newer credit platforms aimed at private debt follow the same accredited-only model. The logic is regulatory: MAS lets platforms that take money only from accredited and institutional investors operate on lighter capital requirements, so many choose that route.
To count as an accredited investor in Singapore you must meet at least one of three thresholds set by MAS: income of at least S$300,000 in the past 12 months, net personal assets above S$2 million (with no more than S$1 million of that counted from your home), or net financial assets above S$1 million. If none of those describe you, these platforms are off the table, and that is by design. The thresholds exist because accredited investors are assumed able to absorb losses and assess risk without the disclosure protections retail investors get.
Do not read accredited-only as safer. It usually means the opposite: larger, more concentrated loans with thinner consumer safeguards. Being shut out of those deals as a retail investor is a feature of the system, not a slight.
The gap between an 18% headline and your real return is wide, and it is where most newcomers get it wrong. Two things eat into the number for most retail investors.
First, the platform fee. A 15% to 18% cut on interest does not sound huge, but it applies to your gross interest, so an 18% gross loan paying a Funding Societies investor becomes roughly 14.8% before anything else goes wrong. Second, defaults. One borrower failing to repay can wipe out the interest from several good loans. If you put S$200 each into ten loans at 12% and one defaults completely, you lose S$200 of principal against roughly S$216 of interest across the rest, leaving you near break-even for the year. That is why platforms push you to spread small amounts across many loans rather than concentrate.
Tax is one place where the news is better than many assume. Funding Societies, the largest retail platform, has obtained an advance tax ruling from IRAS confirming that, for individual Singapore tax residents, returns earned from the 2020 year onward are exempt from income tax, because the loans are structured as debt securities. The platform states plainly that those returns are tax exempt in the hands of individual Singaporean tax residents from 2020 onward; interest earned before 2020 was still taxable, and the exemption does not extend to companies or institutional investors. Non-residents are treated differently: Funding Societies applies a 15% withholding tax to returns paid to non-resident individuals, so the exemption is a Singapore-resident benefit, not a universal one. Do not generalise across every platform or product, and do not assume it covers you. Interest you earn from lending money in the course of a trade or business is taxable, so if your activity looks like a moneylending business rather than passive investing, confirm your own position with IRAS and check the tax notice on whichever platform you use. If you do have taxable interest from other sources, our income tax calculator shows what your marginal rate does to it.
Stack the fee and default risk together and a quoted 18% gross can realistically land somewhere in the high single digits to low teens in a good year, and below zero in a bad one. Treat the platform's advertised return as a ceiling under perfect conditions, not an expectation.
Say you lend S$5,000 spread across 25 invoice-financing notes averaging 14% gross over a year on Funding Societies.
The single biggest mistake first-timers make is putting too much into too few loans. P2P returns only behave like the platform average if you hold a large, spread-out book. Concentrate into five or six loans and one default can erase a whole year of interest, the way the worked example above shows. The platforms set their minimums low precisely so you can diversify: S$20 a note on Funding Societies means a S$2,000 commitment can be split across a hundred different borrowers. A reasonable starting target for a retail lender is at least 50 separate loans, and ideally over 100, before the law of averages starts working for you instead of against you. This is the same diversification logic that drives every sensible investment approach, applied to credit.
Funding the loans by hand is tedious at that scale, so Funding Societies offers an auto-invest bot. You set rules once, such as which loan products to fund, the interest-rate and tenure ranges you will accept, and the amount to deploy per note, and the bot places small bids automatically as new notes open. It is a convenience tool, not a safety feature: it follows your rules, it does not screen out bad borrowers for you, and an aggressive setting still concentrates risk if you let it bid large. Use it to spread small, not to chase the highest-rate notes.
Spread across products too, not just across borrowers. Property-backed and secured notes at 4% to 8% behave very differently from unsecured invoice financing at 8% to 18%. A book that is all high-rate unsecured paper has a fatter advertised yield and a fatter loss tail. Mixing in lower-rate secured notes trades some headline return for steadier outcomes, which is usually the right call for money you cannot afford to lose. Treat the rate a loan offers as the market's estimate of how likely it is to default, not as free money.
Understanding the borrower side tells you exactly what risk you are paid to take. Most P2P borrowers are small businesses that cannot get the amount they need, fast enough, from a bank, often because they lack collateral, a long trading history or audited accounts. Banks and government-backed schemes are cheaper, so a healthy SME usually exhausts those first. The Enterprise Financing Scheme run by Enterprise Singapore, for example, offers an SME Working Capital Loan of up to S$500,000 per borrower over a term of up to five years, with the government sharing 50% of the default risk with the lender, and a higher 70% risk-share for young enterprises. Bank rates on that kind of facility sit far below P2P headline rates.
So when a business agrees to pay a P2P investor 12% to 18% a year on a short, unsecured loan, it is usually because the cheaper doors were closed or too slow. That premium is not generosity. It is the price of higher default odds, and it is your compensation for taking risk a bank declined or a government scheme could not reach in time. The rate is the warning label, not the reward.
This is also why P2P sits beside, rather than above, the safer rungs of your own savings. If you would not lend your own money unsecured to a small business you had never met, the platform structure does not change the underlying bet. It only spreads it. Where a struggling borrower might instead lean on a debt consolidation plan to manage existing repayments, your loan is fresh credit at the riskier end of the queue.
| Feature | P2P lending (retail investor view) | Bank / EFS SME Working Capital Loan |
|---|---|---|
| Typical cost to borrower | 8% to 18% p.a. (financing notes) | Below P2P; partly government risk-shared |
| Maximum quantum | Per-note, funded by many small lenders | Up to S$500,000 per borrower (EFS-WCL) |
| Tenure | Short, often up to 12 months | Up to 5 years (EFS-WCL) |
| Collateral | Often unsecured | Often required or partly risk-shared by government |
| Default risk borne by | You, the investor | Bank, with 50% to 70% shared by government |
| Speed of disbursal | Fast, sometimes days | Slower, fuller credit assessment |
| Your protection if it sours | None beyond recovery efforts | Not your loan to lose |
MoneySense, the national financial education programme, sets out the risks of crowdfunding plainly, and they apply directly to P2P lending. None of them are theoretical.
If a dispute arises with a platform, you can raise it with the operator first, and if it is not resolved, the Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre (FIDReC) handles eligible complaints through mediation and adjudication. You must bring your case to FIDReC within six months of receiving the platform's final reply. That is a complaints channel, not a guarantee of getting your capital back.
Every P2P lending platform that operates in Singapore must hold a Capital Markets Services licence from MAS, because arranging these loans is a regulated activity under the Securities and Futures Act. A licensed operator must keep client money segregated, maintain records, treat investors fairly and disclose the prescribed risks.
The capital rules help explain why some platforms go retail and others stay accredited-only. To encourage securities-based crowdfunding, MAS lowered the base capital requirement for dealing in capital markets products to S$50,000 and removed the previous S$100,000 security deposit for operators that take money only from accredited and institutional investors and do not hold, handle or accept customer money. A platform that wants to serve retail investors, or that holds customer money, falls outside that concession and faces the standard dealing requirements, which for dealing in capital markets products start at S$250,000 of base capital. Lower barriers for the accredited-only route, but a far smaller pool of allowed clients. The exact requirement for a given platform depends on its licence conditions, set out in the MAS rules on capital markets services licensees.
There is also a disclosure shortcut. Issuers normally have to register a prospectus, but small offers up to S$5 million within any 12-month period, or offers to no more than 50 people, can skip the full prospectus. That is how a single SME loan can be funded by many small lenders without a heavy document each time. The trade-off is that you, the lender, are getting less standardised disclosure than you would for a listed bond. Before committing, confirm the platform's licence status on the MAS Financial Institutions Directory and read the loan-level information it does provide.
P2P lending makes sense for a narrow set of people: those who already have an emergency fund in cash, have covered the safer rungs of their savings, and have money they can afford to lose chasing a higher yield. Even then, it should be a small satellite position, not a core holding. A common rule of thumb is to keep speculative high-yield exposure to a single-digit percentage of your portfolio, and within P2P to spread that across as many loans as the platform allows so one bad borrower cannot sink your year.
If your goal is simply to beat your savings account with low risk, P2P is the wrong tool. A fixed deposit, a T-bill or a Singapore Savings Bond gives you a known, government- or bank-backed return without the default risk, and you can compare those head to head in our SSB vs T-bill vs fixed deposit breakdown. If you want growth and can stomach volatility, a low-cost index fund or REIT ETF gives you diversification that a handful of SME loans never will.
P2P earns its place only as a deliberate, diversified, small bet by someone who understands that the headline rate is the best case and the downside is real. Run the money you would commit through our fixed deposit vs investing calculator first, and only put in what you can watch go to zero without losing sleep.
It is regulated by MAS but it is not safe in the way a deposit is. Platforms must hold a Capital Markets Services licence, but your individual loans can default, the platform itself can fail, and none of it is covered by deposit insurance. Treat it as high-risk credit where you can lose part or all of any single loan, not as a savings product.
Platforms advertise 8% to 18% a year on financing loans, but that is gross. After the platform fee of 15% to 18% of interest and after any defaults, a good year often nets somewhere in the high single digits to low teens, and a bad year can be negative. On Funding Societies, returns to individual Singapore tax residents are tax exempt under an IRAS ruling, so tax is usually not a further drag there, but defaults always are. Treat the headline rate as a ceiling, not an expectation.
On Funding Societies you can invest from S$20 per note after a S$100 initial deposit. On Minterest you can invest from about S$50 per campaign, but you need to transfer at least S$1,000 into its escrow account to start. Accredited-only platforms like Validus require far more, commonly cited around S$50,000; confirm the current figure on the platform.
No. Funding Societies and Minterest accept retail investors, but several platforms including Validus lend only to accredited and institutional investors. To be accredited you need income of at least S$300,000 in the past year, net personal assets over S$2 million, or net financial assets over S$1 million.
For individual Singapore tax residents on the main retail platforms, generally not. Funding Societies, for example, holds an IRAS advance ruling confirming that returns earned from the 2020 year onward are tax exempt in the hands of individual Singaporean tax residents, because the loans are structured as debt securities. The exemption does not cover foreigners, companies or institutional investors, and it does not cover interest you earn in the course of a moneylending business. Check the platform's own tax notice and, if your situation is unusual, confirm with IRAS.
You could lose money. MAS requires licensed operators to keep client funds segregated, which helps, but if the platform that collects repayments and passes them to you fails, recovering your capital can be slow or incomplete. There is no deposit insurance backing P2P loans, so platform failure is a risk you carry.
Only for very different goals. A fixed deposit gives a known, SDIC-protected return with no default risk. P2P offers a higher potential return in exchange for real risk of loss and no protection. If you want safety, a fixed deposit, T-bill or Singapore Savings Bond wins. P2P only suits money you can afford to lose.
Generally no. P2P loans are illiquid by design. There is no deep secondary market in Singapore, so once you fund a note your money is locked up until the borrower repays, typically up to 12 months on the main platforms. A few platforms have at times offered limited transfer features, but you should plan as if you cannot get out early. If you might need the cash within a year, a T-bill or fixed deposit suits far better, because those can be timed to mature when you need the money.
As many as you reasonably can. A handful of loans behaves nothing like the platform's average default rate, so one bad borrower can wipe out a year of interest. A sensible retail target is at least 50 separate loans, and over 100 is better. Because Funding Societies lets you invest from S$20 a note, even a S$2,000 commitment can be split across a hundred borrowers. Many investors use the platform's auto-invest bot to place small bids automatically across new notes rather than funding each one by hand.
Secured or property-backed notes have collateral the platform can claim if the borrower defaults, which lowers your loss and the rate, often 4% to 8% a year. Unsecured notes such as invoice financing and business term loans have no collateral, so they pay more, often 8% to 18%, but a default can mean losing the whole loan. The higher rate is the price of the higher risk, not a free upgrade. Mixing both is usually wiser than holding only the highest-rate unsecured paper.
Older P2P guides still list five or six retail platforms, but the Singapore market has consolidated. Several names have wound down their retail offering, moved to serving only accredited and institutional investors, or exited lending entirely. For an ordinary retail investor in 2026 the practical choices are Funding Societies and Minterest. Always confirm a platform still holds a live Capital Markets Services licence on the MAS Financial Institutions Directory before sending it money, because a name appearing in an old article does not mean it still takes retail funds.
This is general financial information for Singapore, not personal financial advice. Figures change — verify current rates against the official sources above before acting. See our full disclaimer.