European Crowdfunding Market Report 2023

Abstract

The European crowdfunding market is dynamic and constantly evolving, while often representing balancing acts between harmonization trends, as driven by cross-border scaling opportunities, and fragmentation trends, as resulting from the local anchoring of activities (Wenzlaff et al., 2020). The current report is set to provide an up-to-date review of the European Crowdfunding industry covering facts and insights for the years 2021 and 2022. In its modern manifestation, crowdfunding is defined as a fundraising method involving the collection of relatively small amounts from a large pool of funding providers via the Internet and with no or little involvement of traditional financial intermediaries. Earlier reports presenting insights on the crowdfunding industry have often covered a wider scope of services under the broad term of “alternative finance” (e.g., Ziegler et al., 2018; Ziegler et al., 2019; Ziegler et al., 2021; Ziegler et al., 2020). However, the current report focuses only on crowdfunding services. This means the report only presents data collected from platforms which are open to crowd participation as both fundraisers (demand) and funding providers (supply). Accordingly, online platforms offering fundraising services outside the traditional financial systems (e.g., digital lenders, digital invoice traders, etc.), while relying solely on institutional or non-retail private funding (i.e., not open for funding by the crowd), were excluded. At the heart of the industry are the firms providing crowdfunding services, also commonly referred to as ‘crowdfunding platforms’ after the technology underlying their operations. The platforms they operate are Internet applications linking fundraisers and prospective fund providers while facilitating exchanges between them under pre-specified conditions (Shneor & Flåten, 2015). Accordingly, all data reported in the current report have been collected from crowdfunding platforms (hereafter ‘platforms’). Throughout the report, data is presented in a comparative manner either with respect to core underlying models (i.e., equity, lending, and non-investment models) or geographical location (i.e., platforms from Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Europe). Table 1 presents the detailed model clustering approach. Here, services offering investments in return-yielding assets are grouped under an equity cluster. Services offering investments in return-yielding credit are grouped under a lending cluster. And services offering transactions with no expectation of financial returns, such as purchases of products/services or donations, are grouped under a non-investment models’ cluster.