Maclear Review 2026: Swiss Address, No Financial Licence

Maclear is a crowdlending platform run by Maclear AG, a Swiss company in Wallisellen near Zurich. Investors fund loans to small and medium-sized European businesses and receive fixed interest of 14–16% a year, according to Maclear's own FAQ; its landing page advertises up to 16.5%. The minimum investment is €50, and everything is in euros.

The platform presents itself as Swiss-regulated. That needs qualifying straight away: Maclear holds no financial licence. It is a member of PolyReg, a self-regulatory organisation for anti-money-laundering, and its own FAQ says it is not directly supervised by FINMA and that funds are not covered by deposit insurance. It is not a bank, and nothing held there is a bank deposit.

Maclear's volume claims have grown quickly but are not consistent across its own pages. On 21 September 2026 the landing page showed more than €151.5 million funded and 54,855 investors; a FAQ article gave €96.1 million and 34,430 investors. Neither figure can be checked against audited accounts, because there are none.

Maclear's founders also run 8lends, a crypto-based lending platform for which Maclear AG acts as collateral agent. We cover that link below; the live figures for Maclear are on the Maclear platform page.

A business applies to Maclear for a loan. Maclear checks it, lists the project, and investors commit money during a fundraising period. Once the target is reached, the pooled money goes to the borrower, who repays on a fixed schedule, usually monthly.

What you actually own

When a project is funded, Maclear sends a Claim Assignment Agreement: Maclear assigns you a proportional share of its loan claim against the borrower. You become a creditor of that business, and you authorise Maclear to collect the debt and enforce collateral on your behalf. Maclear says that because the claims belong to investors, they survive if Maclear itself closes; another party would take over administration.

That structure is better than a claim on the platform's balance sheet, but it depends on paperwork and processes run by one small company. Maclear's 2024 accounts show a loan portfolio of CHF 9.3 million on its own balance sheet, financed by liabilities of similar size. We could not establish from the report how those balance-sheet positions relate to the claims assigned to investors, and Maclear does not name the bank that holds its escrow account.

Who checks the borrowers

Maclear describes three stages: documents and credit-bureau extracts, anti-money-laundering and KYB screening, and a financial review with a questionnaire of about 40 questions. It assigns ratings from AAA to D. The same company sources the loan, rates it, lists it, services it and enforces the collateral — which is why we treat the whole portfolio as exposure to a single counterparty.

The operating company is Maclear AG, UID CHE-115.674.165, Richtistrasse 7, 8304 Wallisellen. According to Maclear, the founders identified the business idea in 2019, acquired the company in 2020 and ran the first investment campaigns in 2023.

Maclear names Denis Ustjev and Alexander Lang as the founders of both Maclear AG and 8lends. On 8lends' pages Ustjev is CEO and Lang CFO; we could not confirm their formal roles on Maclear AG's board from a primary source, so check the Swiss commercial register (zefix.ch) before investing.

The 2024 annual report gives fewer than ten employees. That is a small team for a platform claiming more than €150 million funded and tens of thousands of investors, and it matters for how thoroughly borrowers are checked and how quickly problems are handled.

The 8lends connection

8lends launched in March 2025 and lends to businesses in USDC and USDT stablecoins. Maclear AG is its collateral agent: it vets 8lends borrowers, structures their collateral and runs recoveries. The same people are therefore selecting borrowers on both platforms. Splitting money between Maclear and 8lends does not diversify — it doubles your exposure to one team's underwriting. Our Maclear vs 8lends comparison sets them side by side.

Maclear accepts residents of 44 European countries, including the EU/EEA, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, aged between 18 and 85. Residents of North America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania and CIS countries are not accepted. Companies can open a separate account.

1. 1Register with your email address and a password.
2. 2Complete identity verification (KYC). Maclear says you cannot deposit or see projects without it.
3. 3Add proof of address and sign Form A (a Swiss anti-money-laundering declaration of the beneficial owner) if you want to use AutoInvest.
4. 4Deposit at least €50 by SEPA transfer from a bank account in your name, quoting your personal reference number.
5. 5Invest manually in listed projects or set up AutoInvest strategies.

Maclear runs sign-up, loyalty and referral bonuses. Treat them as marketing: a few euros of cashback does not change the risk of the loans or the company.

Before depositing, read the regulation and financials sections below and decide how much you could lose in full without it affecting your plans.

Getting started on Maclear is quick: identity verification is automated and usually takes a few minutes, instant euro deposits are free, and AutoInvest is set up through a clear step-by-step form.

Signing up

Verification runs through Sumsub and is fully online. You pick your document (passport, national ID card or residence permit), scan a QR code to continue on your phone, photograph the document and take a selfie. Maclear says the check typically takes up to 10 minutes, you are told the result by email, and a failed attempt can usually be resubmitted the same day.

Deposits

For the fastest route, activate SEPA Instant once in the Deposit/Withdraw section; Maclear says your personal virtual IBAN is ready within about five minutes. Transfers to it arrive within minutes of leaving your bank, subject to Maclear's routine anti-money-laundering checks, with no deposit fee. Ordinary SEPA transfers remain available as well.

Setting up AutoInvest

The AutoInvest form walks through nine steps: name the strategy, set the amount per project (from €50), a minimum interest rate and a term range, then optionally narrow it by risk band, country and project type. Advanced filters add debt-to-equity, LTV and credit-history score. You can run up to ten strategies side by side and still invest manually. Maclear itself notes that very narrow settings may match few or no projects.

Security and documents

• Two-factor authentication by Google Authenticator or email code
• A tax statement as a PDF under Statements → Tax, for any date range, as often as you need it
• Other documents prepared on request by the support team

Platform and support

Maclear is used through its web platform; its site offers no app-store download. Support starts with a chatbot on the platform, which hands questions it cannot answer to the team; replies come by email, and support@maclear.ch is the main contact. Maclear says weekend replies can take 24–48 hours. There is no phone line.

Money moves by SEPA bank transfer in euros only. Maclear supports SEPA Instant via a virtual IBAN.

• Deposits: minimum €50, no Maclear fee. Maclear says funds usually arrive within 1–3 business days and are credited the next business morning. Your bank may charge its own fee.
• Withdrawals: minimum €50, no Maclear fee, processed within 1–2 business days; eurozone transfers usually arrive one business day after processing. Withdrawals go only to a verified bank account in your own name.

As with any lending platform, only uninvested cash can be withdrawn. Money in active loans comes back through repayments or a sale on the secondary market.

Maclear says uninvested money is held in a segregated escrow account with partner banks, separate from its operating accounts. It does not name those banks in the articles we read, so the segregation cannot be checked from outside.

Manual investing

You pick projects from the list, each with a rating, interest rate, term, collateral description and loan-to-value (LTV). The minimum is €50 on the primary market and €30 on the secondary market. Maclear classifies LTV in bands from 40–80% (low risk) to 160–200% (high risk), and says that at the higher end collateral enforcement may not cover the principal. An LTV above 100% means the loan is larger than the value of the collateral.

AutoInvest

AutoInvest invests automatically according to up to 10 strategies. Filters include amount, minimum APR, term, risk rating (AAA–D), country, project type, debt-to-equity, LTV and a credit-history score. AutoInvest reserves allocations before manual investors can access a project. No AutoInvest fee is mentioned.

Collateral types

Maclear accepts real estate, business equipment, receivables and personal guarantees from company owners. These are very different: a first-rank mortgage on a building is a strong claim; a personal guarantee from the owner of a failing company often is not. Check the collateral on each project rather than relying on the word "collateralised".

Maclear's projects carry fixed rates of 14–16% a year, locked for the term once funded. The landing page advertises up to 16.5%, and loyalty tiers add bonus returns for large balances. These are contractual rates on performing loans, not measured returns.

We could not find a realised or net return figure published by Maclear, and there is no audited data to derive one from. With one disclosed default and a young loan book, the realised return so far may be close to the contract rate, but that says little about how the book performs in a downturn. Most loans have been made since 2024, a period of steady growth for the platform.

A rate of 14–16% for SME loans is roughly double what licensed business-loan platforms typically pay. The difference is a price for risk: small borrowers that could not get cheaper credit, and a platform without licence, supervision or audited accounts. The landing page's promise of "guaranteed monthly payouts" sits badly with Maclear's own FAQ, which states that it "does not guarantee the return of capital".

Maclear's costs for investors are low:

• Deposits, investments and withdrawals: no Maclear fee. Maclear says its commission is built into the rate the borrower pays.
• Secondary market sale: 2.5% of the sale price, charged only if the sale completes. Buyers pay nothing.
• Cancelled or expired listings: free.
• Bank charges: whatever your own bank charges for SEPA transfers.

The 2.5% seller fee is high next to larger platforms. On a loan with six months left at 15% a year, it takes about a third of the remaining interest. Plan to hold loans to maturity and treat the secondary market as an emergency exit.

Maclear's secondary market is one of its genuine strengths. By Maclear's own figures for May 2024 to May 2026, €16.26 million changed hands in 65,079 trades. It reports a median time to sale of about three hours, 80.7% of listings sold within a day and 97% within seven days.

The rules: listings stay up for 14 days and are then removed at no cost; you can sell at face value or at a discount of up to 50%; the minimum trade is €30; the 2.5% fee applies only on completion. Maclear's FAQ states there is no mandatory holding period before listing.

These statistics describe a period in which the platform was growing and only one loan defaulted. Secondary markets depend on new buyers, and they thin out quickly when a platform or its borrowers run into trouble. Liquidity is good today; it is not a feature you can count on in a crisis.

Maclear does not offer a buyback. Protection rests on two things.

Collateral

Each loan is secured, and Maclear acts as collateral agent for investors. Maclear's process: from day 3 of a delay the Provision Fund pays interest; from day 30, soft collection; from day 60, legal proceedings and collateral enforcement; from day 90, a "reverse assignment" of the claim. Enforcement is carried out by Maclear, so a collateral structure is only as useful as Maclear's ability and willingness to use it.

Provision Fund

Maclear puts 2% of every funded project into a Provision Fund, held in a separate bank account and financed from its own revenue. It covers interest when a borrower is more than three days late. Maclear states that the fund "does not guarantee the return of principal" and is "not an insurance product". Its current balance is shown inside the platform; we could not read it.

Both the collateral and the fund are run by Maclear AG, the company with negative equity. If Maclear failed, investors would depend on another party taking over enforcement of claims that Maclear documented.

This is the weakest part of Maclear's case.

• No FINMA licence. Maclear's own FAQ: "Maclear is not a bank and is not directly supervised by FINMA." It says FINMA oversight reaches it only indirectly through PolyReg.
• PolyReg covers anti-money-laundering. Maclear has been a member of PolyReg Services GmbH SRO since May 2022. That membership is about anti-money-laundering, KYC and related conduct rules. It is not prudential supervision: nobody checks Maclear's capital, its lending standards or how it holds investor money.
• No EU licence. Maclear holds no crowdfunding licence under the EU's ECSPR regulation, and its FAQ says it is not licensed or supervised by national regulators in EU member states — although most of its investors live in the EU.
• No compensation or deposit scheme. Maclear says funds are not covered by Swiss deposit insurance (esisuisse). No investor compensation scheme applies.

The Spanish warning

The Spanish crowdlending site todocrowdlending.com reports that on 11 May 2026 Spain's securities regulator, the CNMV, published a warning that Maclear AG and www.maclear.ch are not authorised to carry out activities reserved for crowdfunding platforms under Spanish law and the European crowdfunding regulation. We could not retrieve the warning itself from cnmv.es: the link given resolved to a different notice, and the CNMV search tool does not display results to our fetcher. Maclear's regulation FAQ does not mention it. Spanish residents are still listed as eligible investors. If you live in Spain, check the CNMV warnings register yourself before investing.

Maclear has published no audited accounts. Its 2024 annual report, prepared under the Swiss Code of Obligations and released on 3 June 2026, names no auditor and contains no audit opinion. The key figures:

• Revenue: CHF 758,222 (2023: CHF 106,097)
• Net loss: CHF −122,941 (2023: CHF −118,379)
• Shareholders' equity: CHF −87,026 at 31 December 2024 (2023: CHF −19,085), despite a CHF 55,000 capital increase to CHF 272,360
• Provision for expected loan losses: CHF 195,049
• Total assets CHF 9.79 million against liabilities of CHF 9.88 million

Negative equity means the company's liabilities exceed its assets. The notes to the report also warn of "a considerable risk that some of the company's assets cannot be repaid".

In a message to investors, Maclear's director called the negative equity "the cost of rapid growth, not of operational problems", said an auditor had been engaged and the accountants changed, and said preliminary data pointed to positive equity by the end of 2025. No 2025 accounts had been published when we checked, so none of that can be verified.

Maclear deserves credit for publishing any accounts at all — it is not obliged to publish them. But a platform handling claims on well over €100 million of loans with negative equity and no audit is a material risk in itself.

Vibroedil (2025)

Maclear discloses one default. Vibroedil S.R.L., an Italian company, borrowed €150,000 in three tranches of €50,000 and entered bankruptcy proceedings in July 2025. Maclear says the case was settled privately, that the borrower kept paying interest for several weeks after the bankruptcy, that the Provision Fund was not used and that 100% of principal was returned to all investors. It does not say where the repayment money came from or whether all interest was paid. We have found no independent confirmation of the recovery.

Borrower figures that did not match registries

The German research site rethink-p2p.de compared borrower financials published on Maclear with national company registries (updated 14 August 2026). For Vibroedil, it reports that the listing showed 2024 revenue of €15.9 million and a profit of €144,390, while the Italian registry showed revenue of €6.4 million and a loss of €1.9 million. It also reports large gaps for two Estonian borrowers: Estlat Building Co OÜ, with projected revenue of €1.97 million for 2024 against €20,450 in the registry, and Transbaltika OÜ, with €856,000 projected against €82,922.

These are third-party findings, and we have not repeated the registry checks ourselves. But they go to the heart of the product: if borrower data on the listing cannot be trusted, neither can the ratings and LTVs built on it. Check borrowers against their national registry before investing.

1. 1Platform risk. Maclear AG has negative equity, no audited accounts and fewer than ten staff. If it fails, recovering assigned claims and enforcing collateral would depend on someone else taking over.
2. 2Regulatory risk. No licence in Switzerland or the EU. A regulator could restrict Maclear's activity in an investor's country, as the reported CNMV warning suggests is possible.
3. 3Borrower and data risk. High-rate loans to small businesses default, and independent checks found borrower figures far above registry data.
4. 4Single-team exposure. One company sources, rates, services and enforces every loan. The same team vets 8lends borrowers, so 8lends is not a diversifier.
5. 5Collateral risk. LTVs up to 200% and personal guarantees mean collateral may not cover the loan.
6. 6Liquidity risk. The secondary market works now; it depends on new buyers and may dry up in a crisis.

These are not bank deposits and no scheme protects them. For a licensed alternative with long published loss data, see our Mintos review and the Mintos vs Maclear comparison.

This is general information, not tax advice. How Maclear income is taxed depends on your country of tax residence.

Maclear does not withhold tax on interest, and it says it does not report investor income to any national tax authority. You are responsible for declaring all income yourself: interest from primary and secondary market investments, cashback, referral rewards and bonuses.

A tax statement can be downloaded as a PDF under Statements → Tax in your account. It lists the income types above and your balances for the period.

Many countries tax foreign interest as ordinary income, and some require you to declare foreign accounts or claims. Losses from defaulted loans may or may not be deductible. Speak to a tax adviser in your country of residence before you file.