"Abundance has worked well for me"

"Your capital is at risk" and Abundance makes this clear.
I try to avoid investing more money than I can afford to lose. I also reduce the risk by taking care not to "put all my eggs in one basket".
Bearing this in mind, I remain content with the operation of the website. All my questions have been answered in a helpful way by Abundance staff.

"Informative helpful platform"

Abundance provides a lot of helpful information which I appreciated as a first-time investor.

"Easy to set up the investment."

Easy to set up the investment.

"Investing is simple and easy with…"

Investing is simple and easy with detaild of potential recipients well presented.

"Smooth process and all calls taken with…"

Smooth process and all calls taken with clear responses. This is something that you find lacking in most other larger intermediaries.
Looking forward to other opportunities being brought to the market.

"Massively high risk…steer clear"

Myself and my wife have now dis-invested our entire portfolios (a total of around £80,000) from Abundance, as we can no longer trust the platform not to lose our money. We are now convinced that ethical funds in the stock market are far safer than the massive gamble that Abundance investments have become.
The investments that have paid up and not gone bust are the early 'subsidy farming' renewable energy ones, plus a great early stage marine turbine one. However, far too many of the other start ups have gone down the pan, with many investors on peer to peer forums reporting default rates in excess of 50% on their portfolios and getting rapidly worse. It is also now clear that even if the companies are involved in maladministration or total incompetence (as the three now probably worthless social housing ones were), Abundance will wash its hands and claim they are just involved in admin ...they will not advocate on behalf of investors and they don't have your best interests in mind.
The platform is now massively high risk, the communication from Abundance is appalling when things go wrong, and the high default rate is now glaringly obvious.
Put your money in ethical funds and steer well clear of Abundance, would be our advice

"Abundance must accept responsibility for its Investment Platform"

I am very disappointed with Abundance investment and based on my negative experience with them, I would warn future investors to treat it as a gamble. I agree with some of the critical reviews that I read on this page and feel that AI do not look after their investors and especially when things go wrong.
My experience so far is as follows:
Out of 4 investments I made, one has failed completely causing me to lose the capital of £10,000. Another is one that looks a dead loss despite the many promisers made in the updates that I have read over the last 2 years. Another Capital of £10,000 looks at a very high risk of being unpaid back. The third one is currently is at the stage of so called Late Payment of interest. The stage at which my second investment was, before it defaulted. Will I lose another £10k?

So that is 75% of the portfolio worth £32,000 at a high risk of being lost, and for this I hold Abundance Investment as mostly responsible for the financial loss, both for me and also for hundreds of other investors who trusted n this platform.
In actual fact it is beginning to look like AI as an investment Platform is proving to be a very lucrative lending facility for companies who are not particularly fussed about the high risks taken with monies provided to them by the investors. I am now of the opinion that only a firm legal action by investors against AI is likely to change the current landscape and would stand a chance of getting their monies back. I say this knowing that while investors knew they were taking a risk in investing their monies in the AI projects, none of us considered that so many of the investment projects would fail at such a high frequency.
And in all this AI has remained supremely above it all. They did not even email or notify investors of what is happening, including sending the updates, issued by the defaulted business as and when they happened.
It's high time AI put some real hard work to recover monies owed to those who invested in good faith in the platform projects. Their being aloof speaks volumes.

"Great idea, mixed execution, terrible communication, leading to impression of mistrust"

The idea behind the platform is a great one. I've had an ISA on the platform since 2018, taking a pragmatic approach to my investment choices, and choosing a wide selection of investments with a widely varying range of operations, risks, and returns.

Most of the investments I made on the platform have performed very poorly. Around 65% of my portfolio is now in default; a further just under 10% are restructured and not paying at the rate or within the timescale originally envisaged; 12% is in the process of making a change; leaving just over 13% which is performing as originally described.

Anyone who invests on a platform like this should be ready to lose some or all of their money, and I accept that even a carefully diverse portfolio such as the one I built up is at risk. However, my main reason for the poor review here is the terrible communication by Abundance (as the platform/intermediary) with their investors. They claim to act as agents, keeping investors informed when things go wrong. However, in fact when the companies involved hit trouble, it's very hard to understand what role Abundance plays, beyond passing on letters. It's not clear how they are representing investors' interests, they are often entirely unwilling to provide information in the interim between updates by the companies, and on occasion emails to them and online chat messages have gone unanswered.

Of particular concern lately and the reason for posting this review has been a set of investments for a company building social housing. Since first being marketed in 2018 they ran into trouble during the Covid pandemic. There were a series of updates to updates and restructures including two votes called to extend the deadline for the investments to mature, first from June 2021 to December 2021 and then from December 2021 to June 2022. When the June 2022 deadline passed by there were a series of further communications indicating that the properties were near-complete and being sold, a process described in July 2022 as being in its 'final stages', before in October 2022 the company behind the investments went into administration when one of the directors went bankrupt.

As of February 2023 new directors are in place but it turns out that the properties are far from complete and the new directors are a) trying to understand the financial position, b) struggling with inadequate record-keeping by the previous directors, c) didn't have access to the company's bank account, d) had reason to believe the previous directors had used funds in ways not permitted by the original deed, possibly including e) applying fraudulently for Covid bounceback loans when the original terms of the agreement said that new debt could not be taken on without the permission of existing investors.

It took more than a year for this situation to become as clear as it is at the moment, and as the new directors have said there is a lot they still don't know. It is difficult to know what Abundance is there for, in its role as an agent or a trustee, if this kind of misconduct by one of their companies passes them by without them forewarning investors of issues such as these. This example is not typical of every underperforming investment in my portfolio, but features of it are present in all of them.

Overall the platform might be good for some 'fun' investing with money you can afford to lose, but I wouldn't dream of putting a pension in it or any form of savings except for the very long term. My experience overall has been poor, and while some of that comes down to me I'd caution against being overly impressed by the slick website, the cute little cartoons, and the claims of social benefit. More liquid, less innovative, and sadly probably also less socially beneficial investments offer a safer place for my money.

"Be very prepared for it to end badly"

If you invest via Abundance, be prepared to lose your money. Of course, everyone investing via Abundance is warned about the risk. But you are also dependent on Abundance's vetting of the projects. As a result of my experiences of restructuring and defaults I would not advise anybody to invest. Perhaps it is better for individuals to invest via an ethical ISA fund so the risk is spread.

"One year in"

I have been investing with Abundance for about a year now, across a range of commercial and local authority projects. I’ve just started getting some early returns back into my account, ready to re-invest as new projects are launched. I love the opportunity to feel like my money is contributing to projects that help make the world a better place, plus some of the best returns I’ve found on the market at the moment. I’m very glad of the ‘innovative finance’ ISA wrapper so that I can avoid paying tax on the income, too!