There is no project selection in the usual sense. Loans are approved and fully funded first by the lending companies - mainly the Wandoo Finance group, whose systems process over 99 percent of applications automatically - and Swaper then lists the right to be repaid on loans that already exist. Investors never see borrower details, cannot pick individual borrowers and cannot price risk; everything pays a flat rate set by the platform. Swaper publishes no criteria for accepting lending companies and assigns no risk grades. The only lender outside the connected group is One Leasing, a small vehicle-leasing firm from North Macedonia added in 2022. In practice, the group decides which of its loans investors get.

Companisto was founded in Berlin in June 2012 by two lawyers, David Rhotert and Tamo Zwinge, who still run it today - fourteen years of founder continuity that is rare in this market. Before Companisto they built and sold the startup partycard; Zwinge practised law at CMS Hasche Sigle. The senior team includes Christoph Schweizer, head of investment with more than 20 years in venture capital, technology chief Cristian Irimia and operations chief Sarah Buge. The company is based in Berlin-Kreuzberg; its own shareholders are not publicly disclosed.

There is no scandal, regulatory action or investor loss on record, but the reviews are poor and the recent direction of travel is the real concern. Swaper's Trustpilot score stood at 2.6 out of 5 from 38 reviews in August 2026, with nearly half at one or two stars. The most common complaints are money sitting uninvested - measured at a median 7.1 percent of portfolios, three times the industry average - thin secondary-market liquidity, and limited transparency about the group behind the loans. The bigger story is structural: the core rate was cut from 14 to 12 percent in July 2025 and to 10 percent in November 2025, the loyalty threshold was raised fivefold with retroactive effect in January 2026, and monthly funding collapsed 85 percent in the year to July 2026 with no explanation from the platform. On one tracking site, 36 percent of Swaper investors said they intended to reduce or exit their position.

Swaper Platform OU is wholly owned by Marina Tjulinova, its sole shareholder since 2019. Estonian and Latvian company records show she is also a board member and part-owner of a company that holds about 14 percent of the Wandoo Finance group - the group whose loans Swaper sells - a link the platform itself does not mention anywhere. Aigars Boruks, with 16 years in fintech, banking and audit at firms including SEB, Deloitte and Swedbank, became CEO in March 2026, replacing Indrek Puolokainen, who had led the platform since 2020. The majority owner of Wandoo itself is not publicly named.

Four lenders, and only one of them puts its own money in. Wandoo Finance Group is the largest at 38% of the portfolio: a Latvian and Spanish short-term consumer lender with 146 staff, revenue of about EUR 61 million, profit of EUR 3.7 million and EUR 11 million of its own capital, roughly seventeen percent of its balance sheet. Its provisions for bad loans tripled to EUR 32.4 million in 2025, and its audit is signed by a small Latvian firm rather than an international one. Every one of its loans on Swaper reads as current, which was not true a year ago when 23% were late. Wandoo Peru is the newcomer and the concern: founded in 2025, fifteen staff, lending 200 to 400 Peruvian sol for thirty days, and already 30% of the portfolio with 41.6% of its loans late. SW Finance is Swaper's own subsidiary, licensed in Estonia, 31% of the portfolio and 98.5% current. One Leasing in North Macedonia is a vehicle lessor, licensed, secured on the car, the only lender with skin in the game at 10%, and 0.02% of the book. Short-term lending of this kind carries heavy losses everywhere, so double-digit bad debt is normal for the business; what is not normal is a one-year-old lender reaching a third of the platform.

After a round closes, the money goes to the startup and becomes its working capital - there is no protected account any more. Companisto's strongest feature kicks in here: funded companies must publish quarterly investor reports covering revenue, gross profit, liquidity and progress against plan, with contractual penalties for missing them and a 94.6 percent on-time record. Investors vote collectively on major events - the KoRo sale needed over 75 percent approval. If the company fails, subordinated investors rank behind every other creditor and in practice recover nothing; Companisto's own guidance for that case is about claiming the loss against tax, not about recovering the money.

Once you hold a claim, the lending company collects the borrower's repayments and passes them on with interest. If a payment runs 60 days late, the lending company must buy the claim back at full value plus accrued interest - and that buyback has never failed in the platform's history. The promise is only as strong as the company making it: it sits with individual Wandoo subsidiaries in Poland, Spain and Romania, or with Swaper's own small subsidiary, not with the group's consolidated balance sheet, and no group-level guarantee has been published. Loans that stay bad after buyback are sold to debt collectors. Investors get no loan-level reporting - only the group's quarterly reports.

Two housekeeping points worth knowing. Estonian residents and all investors from Poland - Swaper's largest lending market - are barred from investing, for reasons the platform has not published, though the new CEO has signalled the Estonian exclusion may be reviewed. And Swaper Platform OU had not filed its own 2025 annual accounts by late August 2026, two months past Estonia's statutory deadline - a poor look for a platform whose case rests on group-level disclosure.

Swaper charges investors nothing: no fees for registering, depositing, investing, using auto-invest, withdrawing or selling on the secondary market. The platform earns from the lending group instead - Wandoo's accounts show it paid Swaper about 1.6 million euros in platform fees in 2024, which means Swaper's income depends on the group whose loans it sells. The real costs are indirect: money often sits uninvested because there are not enough loans - typically about 7 percent of a portfolio, which trims returns - and currency conversion outside euros and pounds is at your expense. Swaper provides no tax reports, so declaring interest income is your job.