Voice-over: This is Leaders in Finance, a podcast where we find out more about the people behind a successful career. We speak with the leaders of today and tomorrow to discuss their motivations, their organizations, and their personal lives. Why? Because the financial sector could use a little more honest conversation.
We’d like to thank our partners for their ongoing support: EY, Mogelijk Vastgoedfinancieringen, Duna, and Lepaya.
Your host is Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: Welcome, listeners, to an extra episode of the Leaders in Finance podcast. I’m very happy that you’re listening, and perhaps also watching this episode, because today I’m joined by Folkert Eshuis, the CEO of investment platform Mogelijk. A very warm welcome, Folkert, for, I must say, the second time on this podcast.
Thank you, Jeroen. Very happy to be here.
Glad to have you. I looked it up before this conversation: it was episode 91, which is hard to believe because we’re currently around episode 206 in our CEO series. That feels like quite a long time ago.
Does it feel like a long time ago for you as well?
Folkert: For sure. I think it’s a totally different time in my journey with Mogelijk, so I’m happy to be here again and update you on the latest developments.
Jeroen: That’s great, because one of those developments, quote unquote, is your 10-year anniversary, right? I saw all these articles in the news saying you’ve been around for 10 years. First of all, congratulations.
Secondly, when you look back at those 10 years, there must have been a lot of changes. What are the first things that come to mind?
Folkert: Thank you. Yes, it’s our 10-year anniversary. Reflecting on those 10 years, what really stands out is that when we started, we started as a solution for SME borrowers. That’s also where our brand name comes from: Mogelijk means “possible” or “opportunity made possible.” It was all about enabling SME entrepreneurs to obtain a mortgage for their property, which, 10 years ago, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, was still quite difficult.
If you look at the market today, I would say that the friction our solution addressed is no longer really about SME lending in the Netherlands. And I actually think that’s a great achievement for the sector. Over the past 10 years, many additional platforms have emerged, with all kinds of different structures and solutions. Today, the focus on the lending side is much more about profiling yourself and offering the right solution for the right type of customer. There is a lot of opportunity for SME borrowers.
On the other side—and that’s the investor side—I would say, in our case, particularly the high-net-worth investor, although it could also be the retail investor, there’s a huge difference compared to 10 years ago. Looking ahead, I think this friction will only continue to grow.
What do I mean by friction? Not necessarily something negative. It’s about deciding where to put your money and how to invest it. I think the days of traditional private banking are, to some extent, behind us. Enabled by technology, information, and a wide range of excellent investment apps, people are increasingly making their own investment decisions.
If you look at trends such as the great wealth transfer—the intergenerational transfer of wealth that will take place over the next decade—this is a market that is growing tremendously. What we aim to do at Mogelijk is build solid investment solutions for that market. It’s still very much about expertise. We believe in clear, transparent, and predictable investment solutions.
So, in a way, we’re in the business of offering what some might call the “boring” investment product. But I actually think that’s a very nice business to be in.
Jeroen: Before I ask a few follow-up questions, I first wanted to ask whether you actually celebrated the 10-year anniversary.
Folkert: Yes, we did.
Jeroen: You did?
Folkert: We actually celebrated it together with our customers throughout the year. Because we have quite an intimate relationship with many of our investors, we decided to organise multiple events—a whole menu of events, really. Investors could choose how they wanted to celebrate our 10-year anniversary with us.
For example, we went to the theatre, organised a barbecue, held a golf tournament—basically something for everyone.
For our staff, we had a fantastic celebration in Limburg, in the south of the Netherlands. We did some sporting activities and, of course, spent some time on the dance floor. I can honestly say I hadn’t danced as much in the previous 10 years as I did during that celebration.
Jeroen: That’s great to hear. And I imagine there were also investors there who have been with you since the very beginning.
Folkert: At the staff party it wasn’t a mixed group, no.
Jeroen: I meant at the investor events.
Folkert: Ah, yes, absolutely. It’s wonderful to meet them. In fact, many of our investors have been with us longer than the average staff member. They’re the people who really know you and have seen every stage of your development.
A lot of what we’ve built is based on their feedback. All of our products have essentially been developed together with our customers. Their feedback has shaped how our products evolved.
Meeting those people in person and talking about how their suggestions led to product improvements is fantastic. It’s also valuable for new staff members. I can introduce someone and say, “This is Jeroen—he’s actually the person whose feedback led us to change this feature in the product.”
People also talk about where else they invest and why. You learn a great deal from how they make investment decisions, and that gives us a lot of energy to keep improving. Learning what our customers find important is incredibly valuable.
Jeroen: Yeah, this is how I came to know you. You’re really a customer-driven person. You’ve always found that extremely important, which obviously makes total sense to me.
If you look back at the last 10 years, what are one or two things that make you most proud of Mogelijk?
Folkert: What I really like about the company, and what has been part of our DNA from the very start, is this positive, can-do mindset. We’re not afraid of an uphill battle. “Battle” sounds a bit negative, though. It’s more like an uphill challenge—that’s probably a better way to put it.
I’m proud that every year we’ve managed to take one or two really significant steps. For example, obtaining a licence while also expanding into another country, or launching a new funding line together with a securitisation programme. Every year we’ve had these two major milestones, and together they’ve brought us to where we are today.
What also makes me proud is that we’ve achieved this with a growing team. Sometimes people have only been with us for five or six months, and they’re already contributing to those big challenges. I think that’s fantastic.
I also love that we’re able to offer people these kinds of opportunities. Sometimes it feels like I’m standing in a candy store, handing out candy to colleagues in the form of exciting, impactful projects, often very early in their careers.
Jeroen: That’s great. It’s a wonderful feeling. If it benefits the company as well, then everybody wins.
I’m curious about your investors. If I remember correctly, you started with private individuals and small business owners investing through the platform—so purely on the funding side. Today, you’re clearly also active in the institutional capital markets. Could you explain who your investors are today?
Folkert: As a platform, we have both the lending side and the investing side. On the lending side, things have remained quite stable. Our borrowers are project developers, real estate investors—people who rent out properties and earn investment income—as well as SMEs looking for a mortgage to finance their own business premises.
On the investor side, we started primarily with high-net-worth individuals. That made sense because many of them were actually the same people who had built up their own property portfolios. Instead of buying another property, they decided to invest in mortgages through the Mogelijk platform.
Sometimes these were older real estate investors who preferred investing in mortgages because it involved much less hassle.
Over time, that group expanded to include many former SME owners. People who had sold their businesses wanted to invest the proceeds wisely or preserve the wealth they had built. They were looking for a relatively safe investment that generated monthly income, which mortgages naturally do because borrowers pay interest every month.
So it offered a combination of a relatively low probability of losing your investment and a steady monthly return. Nothing spectacular—you won’t have exciting stories to tell at birthday parties. It’s a bit of a boring investment product, and that’s perfectly fine.
We also attracted a lot of borrowers during the buy-to-let boom around 2020, when many people were buying apartments to rent them out. For that market, we entered into a partnership with Morgan Stanley, which marked our first step into institutional funding through a securitisation programme.
Later, we replaced that funding arrangement with another institutional investor, again using a securitisation programme. Initially, those institutional investors were mainly interested in our buy-to-let portfolio, but later they also became interested in granular commercial real estate lending and SME financing.
Today, institutional investors account for roughly one-third of our funding. The remaining two-thirds still comes from high-net-worth investors. In our business, we define high-net-worth investors simply as people investing more than €100,000, although in practice many invest between €500,000 and €1 million through our platform.
We then obtained both the AIFMD licence and the ECSP licence. Those are a lot of acronyms, but in short: peer-to-peer lending falls under the European crowdfunding regulatory framework. Previously, we only facilitated investors with investments above €100,000. So although we operated in the peer-to-peer lending space, we deliberately focused on wealthier investors rather than retail investors.
Where many crowdfunding platforms allow people to invest €150, €1,000 or €2,000, we deliberately stayed in the high-net-worth segment.
With the AIFMD licence, we are now also entering the retail market. It’s still very early days. We’ve lowered our minimum investment amount to €25,000. That’s obviously not yet retail in the same way traditional crowdfunding platforms define it, but it’s our first step towards making our products accessible to a broader audience.
We’re now carefully considering what our strategy for that retail market should be.
Jeroen: Why is that?
Folkert: Because I think it’s a very interesting product to offer to retail investors as well. At the same time, we need to think carefully about the operating model. How do you maintain a close relationship with customers who invest €500, €1,000 or €5,000?
For now, we’ve lowered the minimum investment to €25,000. So anyone investing €25,000 or more can now use our investment app, open an account and start investing.
Voice-over: This is the Leaders in Finance podcast with Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: While preparing for this conversation, two milestones stood out to me. One was your international expansion—you already referred to it, although I don’t think you mentioned the country. That’s Germany, right?
The other milestone is, of course, that you’ve passed the €3 billion mark in investments facilitated through the platform. Could you tell us more about both?
Folkert: Let me start with the second one.
I joined the company six years ago, when we had just reached the €300 million milestone. Over the past six years, we’ve grown that to more than €3 billion in total originations, of which almost €2 billion is still in our portfolio.
I actually think there comes a point where you stop focusing on the total amount that has ever been invested through the platform and start focusing on the assets that are actually under administration. We’ve really grown into a billion-euro investment platform.
Internally, I often explain to our team that if we simply continue doing what we’re doing today, our portfolio will naturally mature towards around €7 billion. That’s simply what today’s run rate implies.
One of the nice things about mortgages is that they’re long-term contracts. That gives you time to prepare for the operational challenges that will arise over the next five years because you can largely predict how your portfolio will evolve.
What I really enjoy is thinking about how we can improve our commercial attractiveness today, what that means for the future development of the portfolio, and how we prepare the organisation for that growth.
You can only be an investment company if your foundations are strong. Every time you launch a new product, enter another country or hire many new people, you inevitably create some cracks in those foundations. You have to keep strengthening them. Sometimes you need to reinforce the entire foundation before you can continue building.
Ultimately, you can only take as much risk as your organisation is capable of supporting. So a lot of what we do is about building the company, strengthening the organisation, improving our systems and investing in our people.
As you know, I come from the insurance industry, so I naturally tend to think in terms of risk.
Jeroen: And the expansion into Germany?
Folkert: Good question.
We expanded into Belgium earlier, in 2024, and this year, in 2026, we’ve expanded into Germany. We’re currently building our German team. We’ve found a great location in Oberhausen, we have an excellent country manager, and we’ve hired our first German colleagues.
In fact—and this is a bit of a scoop—we’ve already appointed a German CFO, who starts on 1 August.
Jeroen: The group?
Folkert: Exactly. This international strategy for Mogelijk…
Jeroen: Is that CFO for the group or specifically for Germany?
Folkert: For the group.
I think that’s a great development because we have to start thinking European. In a way, we’re part of that European journey.
More and more legislation now comes from Europe rather than from individual countries. You also see national regulators increasingly being complemented or replaced by European authorities. AMLA is just one example.
Both of our licences—the AIFMD licence and the ECSP licence—are European licences. The same trend is visible with PSD3. Financial institutions are gradually becoming more Europeanised, if that’s even a word.
That also means we need to start thinking from a European perspective, and I think that’s a fascinating challenge.
I’ve worked in financial institutions for a long time. Traditionally, banking and insurance have always operated through local licences, with each country functioning as its own silo. There has never been much synergy across borders, and expanding internationally has always been strategically difficult.
I think we have the opportunity to build Mogelijk as a genuinely European company from the outset. Of course, it’s still complicated. Tax systems differ enormously from country to country, and all the related legislation makes things challenging as well. But at least we can try.
Ten years from now, I think it’s possible to build some wonderful financial institutions with a truly strong European foundation.
Jeroen: You already reached €3 billion in the Netherlands—and to a lesser extent Belgium—but Germany is such a much larger market. From a potential perspective, it’s easy to see why this is so interesting.
Will you also attract local funding there, or do all three countries share the same funding pool?
Folkert: We raise funding through the same funds, so Belgian, German or even Italian investors can all participate in them.
At the same time, we recognise that investors may have local preferences. For example, a Belgian investor may prefer investing in Belgian real estate. That’s already possible today through our peer-to-peer lending platform, where someone can simply select a property in Antwerp or Brussels.
So we actually offer both approaches.
One of the advantages of having the AIFMD licence is that it allows us to continue developing new investment products based on what customers tell us they want.
We’re seeing strong interest from German investors, particularly because of the predictable nature of mortgage investments. That’s encouraging.
We do have to distinguish ourselves from some of the more traditional crowdfunding platforms. Many crowdfunding platforms have grown rapidly by financing real estate development projects—typically short-term, 18-month development loans with relatively high risk.
That’s very different from our portfolio.
Our average loan-to-value ratio is around 58%, and we are not heavily exposed to property development. Development financing accounts for roughly 10% of our portfolio, while in some of our funds it doesn’t exist at all.
As a result, our default rates, recovery scenarios and overall risk profile are fundamentally different.
Sometimes people confuse us with those other platforms, but that’s simply a matter of telling our story clearly.
Jeroen: Exactly. That’s something that’s come back several times during this conversation. You describe your products as “boring,” but I would say they simply have a relatively low-risk profile.
My last question—and it’s really two questions in one.
Looking ahead, what do you see as your biggest challenge? That could be an external challenge, like a real estate crisis, or something internal.
Secondly, where do you ultimately see Mogelijk going? You’ve already suggested that €3 billion could eventually become €7 billion. Is the ambition to build a European business managing hundreds of billions, or do you think about it differently?
So, in short: what’s the biggest challenge, and what’s the biggest opportunity?
Folkert: I actually think they’re two sides of the same coin.
We like taking on challenges, and a lot of what we do is driven by customer feedback. As we expand geographically and grow our customer base, we receive more and more ideas about additional value we could provide.
For example, investors increasingly ask for different investment products with different risk-return profiles. They tell us, “If you can manage it, we’d love to see more products.”
That’s a wonderful compliment, but if we immediately start responding to every request, we risk diversifying too quickly and losing the quality of execution we’re known for.
That’s true on both the investment side and the lending side.
I think the non-bank lending sector has produced many excellent point solutions: factoring, current accounts, unsecured lending, mortgages, leasing. They’re all outstanding niche platforms.
Over the next 10 years, I think the key question will be whether those products become more integrated.
Should we add those products ourselves? Should we distribute third-party products? Or should we remain focused on our own core offering and continue delivering the operational excellence and customer experience that specialised providers are known for?
Jeroen: Because you can stay fully focused. You’re describing different scenarios. Have you already decided which direction you’ll take?
Folkert: No, not yet. That’s exactly the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night.
I know I’d enjoy doing all of it, but we have to make smart choices.
For now, we’ve decided to expand geographically with our existing offering. It’s very much a schoenmaker, blijf bij je leest strategy: continue offering mortgage-based investment opportunities while entering additional markets.
The challenge will be understanding how customer preferences evolve. Will customers continue preferring specialised companies that deliver one product exceptionally well? Or will they increasingly expect a broader product offering?
We’ll have to navigate that carefully.
The good news is that our team already has experience with multiple financial products. Our IT infrastructure, with some adjustments, is capable of supporting more products. Our licences also provide room to expand.
Many of the building blocks are already in place. The real challenge is making sure we always deliver on our promises.
That’s both our biggest challenge and our biggest opportunity.
Jeroen: That’s very clear.
Maybe one final follow-up. Which country would be highest on your list after Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands?
Folkert: I’d first like to put more emphasis on the French-speaking part of Belgium. That means adding French to our platform, which would naturally become a stepping stone towards France.
We also receive many requests from Dutch customers for investment opportunities in Spain.
And with Germany, it’s logical to think more broadly about the entire DACH region.
So I expect our focus to remain on north-western Europe. Since we’ve already introduced German to the platform, I think French will most likely be the next language because we’re already active in Belgium.
Jeroen: Exciting times. It also means the CEO will probably be travelling quite a bit more than before.
Folkert: That’s true.
For me, the past quarter has really been about strengthening the leadership team and bringing in additional expertise.
We’ve welcomed an excellent new Chief Marketing Officer, a great new Chief Technology Officer and, as I mentioned earlier, a new CFO.
That gives us the strength—and the foundation—to take the next step.
I’m really looking forward to it.
Jeroen: Wonderful.
The CEO of investment platform Mogelijk, Folkert Eshuis, thank you very much for your time.
It’s remarkable to see the journey from roughly €300 million when you joined the company to more than €3 billion today. That’s more than just a number—it says a great deal about the growth you’ve achieved.
Thank you again. I’ve followed your journey for quite some time, and I’m sure we’ll speak again in the future, if you’re willing.
Thanks so much for your time.
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