Our mission is to create the Europe of Savings: allowing European lenders to invest directly in European companies . In this tutorial, we present you the investment rules depending of the country of origin and the size of the projects. 

In order to protect individuals from investing amounts that could jeopardize their economic situation in case of capital loss, the law provides investment limits to be implemented by the crowdlending platforms.

Retail lenders can lend up to €2,000 per project (this is a French limit imposed by the local regulator in order to push individuals to diversify their loan portfolio), 

There are no annual limits on the number of loans or on the amount lent.

These projects are usually funded quickly since the amount available to retail lenders is very limited, as the October fund covers 51% or the project. To enable the maximum number of lenders to participate in them and promote diversification, we apply an investment limit of €100 on projects of less than €100,000. For loans above €100,000 the limit is €2,000.

This limit has no impact on the distribution between institutional lenders and individual lenders. Institutional Investors will remain at 51%. The idea is not to increase this share, but to increase the number of private lenders.

A few projects can be denied to some investors for regulatory reasons.

Restrictions are applied when offering a project to some countries would create administrative complications for lenders or for October: this is the case for Italian projects, which are currently open for lenders with fiscal residence in Italy only.

For regulatory reasons we cannot open German projects to individuals and German tax residents are not allowed to lend on October. This is because BaFin (German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority) requires the use of a fronting bank to allow retail investment in loans. We have studied this possibility, which has been chosen by other platforms, but the additional constraints and costs make this an unacceptable alternative under our business model. German projects will only be funded by our institutional lenders (nor Spanish, Italian, French or Dutch retail lenders will be able to German projects).

We will continue to work hard, with our peers in the European Crowdfunding Network, to allow German lenders on the platform in the future. How? We are confident that regulation, particularly at European level, will evolve to enable you to support the growth of European companies.