Platform fees are close to zero: no registration fee, no service fee, no charge on money in or out, no management fee, no performance fee and no resale fee since there is no resale market. The chargeable items are avoidable or punitive: EUR 20 for a specially prepared statement, EUR 2 a month on inactive accounts, 2% of the transfer with a EUR 30 minimum on failed deposits, and — new from 1 August 2026 — 2% of your available balance per month where your due diligence paperwork is incomplete. That last one is aggressive and worth checking. The real cost is tax withheld at source: 5% for EU and EEA private investors, 25.5% for most others.

Yes, on four fronts. First, a regulatory penalty that is still on the register: on 11 October 2022 Latvia's central bank issued a warning and a EUR 21,277.58 fine for failures in money-laundering, terrorist-financing and sanctions compliance, recorded as in force in August 2026 and mentioned nowhere in the platform's marketing. Second, poor reviews: one source reporting Trustpilot puts it at 2.6 out of 5 from 52 reviews with over 40% at one star, and complaints about support, unclear charges and delays. Third, and most serious, conduct: independent reviewers record that terms can be changed without notifying users, that the buyback button was removed from credit lines, and that auto-invest settings were altered without consent during the 2022 restructuring. Fourth, money is leaving — one tracker ranked the platform 45th of 46 by net flows in the second quarter of 2026. Against all that, no investor has lost capital in ten years and no fraud or payment suspension has been alleged.

There is no selection process in the usual sense, and that is the defining fact here. VIAINVEST does not screen between competing lenders because there is only ever one source: subsidiaries of VIA SMS Group originate 100% of the loans, and the platform, the note issuer and the lenders all share the same ultimate owner. Selection happens one level down inside each lending arm's own underwriting, and none of it is disclosed — no criteria, no scorecards, no acceptance rates. You choose between pools by lender, country, rate and term, and under the current structure you cannot see individual loan statuses at all, something investors could do before 2022. The one hard protection comes from the prospectus: the lender must keep at least 5% of each loan.

It is the only question that matters here, and it cannot be answered properly - which is itself the answer. The group's own prospectuses of May 2026 give no figures at all for the guaranteeing company beyond EUR 813,000 of share capital: no assets, no equity, no profit. The last full accounts anyone can obtain are from 2022, showing EUR 6.7 million of equity, and the file the group's own website points to for 2024 does not open. What the prospectuses do show is the lending. At the end of 2025 the group had EUR 84.4 million out on loan and EUR 14.0 million of it was more than 90 days unpaid. Latvia, at 60% of the book, is healthy - only 1.3% unpaid. The other three arms are not: 22% unpaid in Sweden, 72% in Czechia, 94% in Romania, with the Czech and Romanian arms holding less in reserves than their own bad loans require. So the group is one good lending business carrying three troubled ones, and you cannot see the balance sheet that decides how long it can keep doing that.

The board of the platform is Eduards Lapkovskis as chairman, Tatjana Kulapina and Alina Gamidova, with Aleksandrs Puzdrans leading the platform and Irina Jakupova heading support. The material fact is the overlap at the top: Lapkovskis is simultaneously chairman of VIAINVEST and a board member of VIA SMS Group, so the person chairing the regulated firm meant to act in your interests also sits on the board of the company whose promise you depend on. Above them, the group is held 80% and 20% by two holding companies, with a single Latvian individual recorded as ultimate owner since August 2018 — but that person's name is not on the public record.

Once a loan is more than 60 days late, the lending arm must buy it back from the issuer at principal plus interest and you get your cash back. There is also a pledge over the loan receivables and the lender keeps at least 5% of each loan. It has worked: reviewers with multi-year records report every buyback paid on time and no capital lost in ten years. The honest caveat is who stands behind it. Every lender is a group subsidiary and the issuer is a group company, so the group is promising to pay itself on your behalf, with no parent guarantee anywhere in the documents. If a lender cannot fund a buyback, the issuer simply does not have to pay you.