There is no account fee, no deposit fee and no fee to withdraw cash. The core charge is 5% to 10% of the interest you earn, set by your bonus tier — one independent reviewer verified the top rate on his own account, with SEK 34.39 taken from SEK 343.97 of interest, exactly 10%. Selling on the secondary market costs 2% to 5%, though strategy savers can sell up to SEK 100,000 free each year after a full year, with unused allowance rolling forward. Swedish tax then takes 30% of the return, turning 6.61% into roughly 4.6%. Two bigger drags are unquantified: idle cash and losses, since the published figure is measured on invested money only.

Trustpilot scores 3.5 out of 5 from 756 reviews, with 13% at one star — high for something marketed as saving. Three themes run through the bad reviews: not being able to get money out, returns far below the advertised band once losses bite, and credits stuck in collections for years. A one-star review of 16 July 2026 says it takes years to liquidate; one of 16 June 2026 reports withdrawals taking several years and an annual return of about 1.5%; one of 12 April 2026 describes lending SEK 20,000 and still not being fully out six years later. A named Swedish investment writer published a piece titled weak returns 2023, reported 3.97% on his own account and wound his position down. Sweden's regulator investigated the consumer lending arm from May 2024 and closed the file without action on 8 May 2026. The share price is down about 77.5% since the 2021 listing.

SaveLend does not underwrite most credit itself. Connected originators do, and in practice the dominant one is its own subsidiary SBL Finans, which has been on the platform since early 2014 and supplies consumer credits, business loans, invoice purchasing, debt collection portfolios and property projects. That vertical integration matters: the same group writes the credit, sells it to you, and writes the promise that limits your loss. Disclosure varies by type. Consumer lending follows a regulated affordability check that survived a two-year regulatory investigation without a single finding. Property credits get a letter grade from A to F set by a credit committee, with F an automatic rejection. For invoices, factoring and debt portfolios, no criteria are published at all.

SaveLend was founded in 2014 by Ludwig Pettersson, after the 2008 crisis, in search of steadier alternatives. Peter Alexander Balod is chief executive of both the operating company and the listed group, and Hakan Nyberg — a well-known Nordic fintech figure and former chief executive of Nordnet — is chairman of both. The group employed 67 people at the end of 2025, about 43 of them in the savings business after the invoicing subsidiary was sold. There is no management page with biographies on the site, but as a listed company the board and management are disclosed in the annual report, and the group has an independent internal audit function, an independent risk function and an external auditor.

SaveLend is not a marketplace of outside lenders. Most of what you invest in is originated inside SaveLend Group itself, and the repurchase promise on consumer credits rests on one company, SBL Finans, a Swedish consumer credit institution licensed by the Financial Supervisory Authority. Its position can be checked, which is more than most platforms allow: the parent, SaveLend Group, is listed on Nasdaq First North in Stockholm, and SBL Finans files its own accounts, audited by Ohrlings PricewaterhouseCoopers. What those accounts show is a small and unprofitable business. Revenue of about SEK 106 million in 2024, a loss of about SEK 3 million, own capital of SEK 10.3 million against SEK 83 million of assets, roughly twelve percent, and losses in 2022 and 2023 as well. The group behind it lost SEK 21.4 million in 2025 and was still lossmaking halfway through 2026. So the promise to buy defaulted consumer credits back at 80 or 100 percent of face value is only as strong as a company holding about EUR 940,000 of equity, and it is not a guarantee from anyone larger.

On 3 July 2026 SBL Finans applied to Sweden's regulator for a credit market company licence, driven by new legislation, with a decision expected around early 2027. The current permission is being retired under legislative pressure and the outcome is not yet known — but if granted it would let the group take deposits, which for that specific product would bring the state deposit guarantee for the first time. That would be a material change to the risk picture and is worth revisiting in 2027.

Diversification is the main defence: the robot fragments your money across a large number of small claims and recycles repayments automatically. Collections run through the originator, not you. When a consumer credit defaults, your remedy is contractual rather than legal — a sale agreement lets you sell it back to SBL Finans at 80% of face value on the 15% coupon type, or at 100% on the 8.5% coupon type. Defaulted credits are then bundled and valued on expected future cash flows, and recoveries are reinvested. The weakness is who is behind that promise: SBL Finans reported equity of about EUR 0.9 million against roughly EUR 190 million on the platform. In a Swedish downturn the promise and the losses would arrive together.