65000
investors
LEND (lend.ch) is Switzerland's largest crowdlending platform, operated by Switzerlend AG in Zurich since 2016. Swiss-based investors lend directly to named Swiss borrowers - private individuals, small companies and mortgage borrowers - from CHF 500 per loan, at fixed rates currently between 4.3% and about 10%, over terms of one to seven years, repaid monthly with interest.
Each loan carries LEND's own score from A+ down to D1, which sets the rate. Since launch the platform has paid out CHF 614 million across 8,774 loans; only about 12% of applications get funded. There is no buyback and no provision fund - if a borrower stops paying, the loss is the investor's, softened only by LEND's collections process and, on mortgages, by property security.
LEND holds a cantonal Zurich consumer-credit licence and is supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes, but it has no banking licence, no FINMA-style prudential supervision, and - Switzerland being outside the EU - none of the EU crowdfunding protections apply.
Uninvested money sits in a separated settlement account at PostFinance, which is also a shareholder. The distinguishing feature is external checking: LEND's loan-book statistics are verified monthly by two independent analytics firms, LoanClear and Exaloan, and it reports a portfolio return of 6.3% a year after loan losses. Investors pay one fee: 1% a year of the amount invested, deducted from repayments.
Pooled products - mortgages from CHF 10,000 and a certificate from CHF 50,000 - are run by external managers.
License / Regulation: Cantonal consumer credit licence plus AML self-regulation
LEND was founded by Florian Kubler and Michel Lalive, who still lead the company, with a named management team including a CTO, heads of personal and commercial lending, collections, and data science. The board is chaired by Dr. Stefan Jaecklin - presented on the website merely as 'Partner & Strategy', though the commercial register shows him as chairman. PostFinance, the Swiss postal bank, became a shareholder in 2019 when LEND acquired Lendico's Swiss business from it. The company employs roughly 15 to 22 people in Zurich and is currently selling its own tokenised shares to the public - a separate, higher-risk proposition from the loans.
On consumer and business loans, no - you hold an unsecured claim and bear full loss risk; only the mortgage products carry property security.
LEND services and collects loans itself, with defined stages: a 15-day grace period, then overdue statuses at 15, 30 and 60 days, default at around 120 days without payment, and finally write-off when recovery is no longer realistic. Borrowers fall into arrears automatically under Swiss law; LEND sends reminders, can terminate the loan, and starts formal Swiss debt-enforcement proceedings on behalf of all investors together - you cannot pursue the borrower yourself. Written-off loans may be sold, with proceeds shared out proportionally. There is no buyback and no provision fund, and LEND publishes no recovery rates, so the workout machinery's actual results cannot be checked from outside.
One fee: 1% a year of your invested amount, deducted automatically from borrower repayments - LEND's example is CHF 10 a year on a CHF 1,000 investment. The subtlety the platform does not explain: because loans repay monthly, your money at work roughly halves on average over the term while the fee stays on the full amount - so 1% works out closer to 2% of the money actually at risk, and on a low-rate A+ loan it can consume most of the margin. No deposit, withdrawal or exit fees; tax statements are free. Fees on the pooled mortgage product and the certificate are not published.
No scandal, no regulatory action and no reported investor-loss event - Swiss press coverage is explanatory rather than critical, and the company register is clean. The visible negatives: Trustpilot 2.7 out of 5 from 55 reviews (July 2026), driven mainly by borrowers rejected without explanation - a mechanical result of accepting only 12% of applications - against a friendlier Google rating of 3.9 from 191 reviews; and long-running investor complaints on the moneyland.ch forum (2016-2020) that the 1% fee erodes thin returns, one poster computing 1.57% net on a 3.5% loan. The structural criticisms weigh more: the unexplained clash between the 0.9% headline default rate and the platform's own 5%-plus mortgage default figures, no published per-grade returns, no press release since 2019, and no as-of date on the statistics page.
Borrowers apply through what LEND calls a parameterised online process: each applicant is checked against Swiss credit databases, scored by LEND's own risk model with third-party data, and - for consumer loans - subjected to the affordability test Swiss consumer-credit law requires. The output is a score from A+ (exceptionally low risk) through B and C to D1, which sets the rate between 4.3% and about 10%. The filter is genuinely tight: only around 12% of applications are funded, consistent with CHF 5.6 billion applied for against CHF 614 million paid out. Not disclosed: which credit bureaus are used, the approval rate by segment, or mortgage loan-to-value limits.
