Abstract
Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending expands access to credit but also raises concerns regarding platform performance, default risk, and long-term sustainability. Despite growing scholarly interest, systematic reviews focusing specifically on P2P lending performance remain limited and conceptually fragmented. This study conducts a systematic literature review following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, examining 179 Scopus-indexed articles published between 2008 and 2025 and limited to Q1–Q3 SJR journals. Descriptive bibliometric analysis and VOSviewer mapping are used to identify publication trends, leading journals, contributing countries, key documents, and the field’s intellectual structure. The findings reveal five thematic clusters dominated by loan-level prediction, credit-risk modeling, and machine-learning techniques, whereas strategic and organizational perspectives remain underexplored. The review identifies five interrelated gaps: the underexplored role of digital leadership, limited attention to organizational capabilities, inadequate treatment of platform-level perceived risk, insufficient conceptualization of innovation, and narrow performance measures. Building on these findings, the study proposes an integrated framework linking these factors to P2P lending performance, with implications for theory development, managerial practice, and regulatory policy.