InSoil Review

InSoil (formerly HeavyFinance) is a Lithuanian P2P platform for secured agricultural loans: investors finance European farmers whose loans are backed by farmland or machinery. p2p-investments.de rates InSoil B (7.0/10) on good data coverage. Its genuine strengths are a verified ECSP licence from the Bank of Lithuania, collateral-backed loans and unusually open portfolio statistics. The main caveat: there is no buyback guarantee, a substantial share of the portfolio is temporarily tied up while defaults are worked out, and the portfolio-wide realised net return is well below the advertised interest. How we arrive at this grade is explained in our rating methodology.

What is InSoil and who is the platform for?

InSoil specialises in a single segment: loans to small and medium-sized farms in Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Portugal and Bulgaria. Unlike the large consumer-loan marketplaces, most of its loans are backed by real collateral — first-lien charges over farmland or machinery. The minimum investment is €100 per loan, investments are made in euros, and there are no fees for investing itself.

The platform was called HeavyFinance until 2025 and has since positioned itself as a climate-finance brand: alongside conventional agricultural loans there are interest-free "Green Loans" whose return is meant to come from the later sale of carbon credits. InSoil suits investors who want secured real assets and a concrete, purposeful theme, and who accept limited liquidity and long recovery times in return. Those who instead expect broad diversification across many loan types and a buyback guarantee are better served by Mintos or other marketplaces.

How does InSoil work?

InSoil is licensed as a crowdfunding service provider under the EU-wide ECSP Regulation. The operator is UAB Heavy Finance (Vilnius), and licence No. LB002201 was granted by the Bank of Lithuania on 14 July 2023 — InSoil was the first Lithuanian platform to hold it. Legally, you acquire a loan claim against the individual farm; payments run through a segregated account in your name at the regulated payment provider Lemonway. This separation of funds structurally shields investor capital should the platform itself become insolvent.

The key difference from buyback-based platforms: InSoil lends directly to farmers and secures the loans with real collateral instead of offering a buyback guarantee. If a loan defaults, no originator steps in to repurchase the claim — instead the pledged collateral is enforced. This mechanism shapes the return more than on most platforms; what it means in practice we explain in a dedicated section further down. You invest manually or through a configurable auto-invest with filters for interest, term, rating (A–D), loan-to-value, country and collateral type. To exit early, you use the secondary market (1% fee) — though its liquidity is limited.

What loans does InSoil offer?

The core is secured agricultural loans: around 40% backed by farmland, about half by machinery and equipment, the rest by other collateral. The loan-to-value caps are, per consistent reviews, around 90% (land) and 70% (machinery), and the collateral is usually first-lien. On part of the Lithuanian book, a guarantee from the state-run Agricultural Credit Guarantee Fund covers up to 80% of principal on default — an extra, hard layer of protection that consumer-loan platforms do not offer. Gross interest ranges from 11.6% to 22.3% (weighted around 13%), with terms of 11 to 48 months (roughly 35 on average). These are bullet loans: interest is paid along the way, principal at maturity.

There are also the Green Loans: interest-free loans for regenerative farming whose return is meant to come not from interest but from the later sale of carbon credits. This is the most ambitious and at the same time most speculative product: the proceeds depend on future carbon markets and long horizons and are not conventionally secured. For investors that means there is usually something to invest in, because InSoil continuously originates new loans — but the offering rests on a single sector (agriculture) and a handful of countries, and performance varies sharply by market: Latvia performs very well per the platform, while Portugal, with a high share of overdue loans, performs clearly worse.

Secured, not bought back: what this means for your return

InSoil's most important peculiarity deserves its own explanation, because it shapes the return more than on most platforms. At buyback-based providers like Mintos or PeerBerry, an originator repurchases a defaulted loan after a short window (usually 60 days) — you get principal and interest back and can reinvest immediately. InSoil deliberately makes no such promise. Instead, every loan is backed by real collateral (land, machinery, in part the state guarantee). If a farmer stops paying, that collateral is enforced: InSoil pursues the claim, sells the pledged asset if necessary, or calls on the guarantee. "Enforcement" (recovery) therefore means the often lengthy process of turning a non-performing claim back into cash via the collateral — in place of a quick buyback payment, there is a collection and enforcement procedure.

This is precisely why the realised return lags the advertised interest. The effect runs through two channels:

• Time, not loss. Enforcement takes around 250 days on average, per the platform. For that long your money is locked in the defaulted loan: it is usually not lost — the collateral typically covers it, and per consistent reports no loan has yet been written off at a loss — but it earns nothing in the meantime. Because at any time around 18–20% of the portfolio is late or in recovery, a noticeable share of your capital sits idle.
• Cash drag when investing. Interest only starts once a loan is fully funded (or 16 working days after full funding); idle cash between investments earns nothing.

Together these push the portfolio-wide net return well below the coupon rate. While fully repaid loans recently returned 15.56% on average, independent analyses arrive at less for a whole portfolio: P2P investor Jean Galea puts his own realised return at 7.84%, and an analysis by BeyondP2P cited by rethink-p2p estimates the effective net return at around 4.5%. Realistically it sits closer to 5–8% than to the advertised ~13%. This is mostly a timing problem, not a total-loss one: investors who are patient and do not need quick liquidity may end up nearer the higher figures once recoveries complete — though that is not guaranteed.

How we rate InSoil

We assess five criteria with fixed weights. The breakdown above summarises the scores; here is the reasoning with evidence (as of June 2026).

Safety & regulation (8/10). The strongest criterion. InSoil is ECSP-licensed and supervised by the Bank of Lithuania — a genuine EU financial regulator, with segregation of funds via Lemonway. Above all, the loans are genuinely secured: first-lien charges over land and machinery, plus the 80% state guarantee on part of the book. So protection does not hinge on a single guarantor's balance sheet but on enforceable real assets. Not full marks, because there is no buyback guarantee, enforcement is slow and not yet tested through a complete economic cycle, and the green/carbon loans are not conventionally secured.

Transparency (8/10). Here InSoil is among the most open platforms on the market. Its monthly portfolio reviews show recovery rates by annual cohort, performance by rating grade and by country — a granularity most providers do not deliver. Owners and management (CEO Laimonas Noreika, formerly FinBee) are named, fees are fully disclosed, and financial results are published annually.

We deduct points because an independently audited statement of the operating company could not be clearly verified publicly, and because the "up to 14%" headline sits well above the realised net return — even though InSoil itself discloses the very data that shows this.

Track record & stability (6/10). Mixed. InSoil has managed investor money since June 2020, has facilitated around €85–90M, has over 15,000 investors and growing volume. It weathered the agricultural crisis from 2022 (war, input costs, rate hikes) and communicated it transparently — withdrawals kept running, recovery progress is disclosed monthly, and in 2023 the company returned to profit (about €0.375M, after a ~€1.1M loss in 2022). That is a plus. Weighing against it: the crisis left a large, still-unresolved overhang — around 18–20% of the portfolio is late or in recovery — the history is only just under five years long, the cycle is not yet complete, and the business depends on a single sector.

Returns & terms (5/10). Gross interest is high and transparently evidenced, and investor fees are low. The decisive factor is the gap between advertised and real explained above: cash drag and the lengthy enforcement of defaults push the portfolio-wide net return to an estimated 5–8% — far below the advertised ~13%. That no loan has yet been written off at a loss softens this: it is mostly a timing problem, not a total-loss one. More on this in our knowledge article returns and risks of P2P lending.

Investor-friendliness & liquidity (6/10). Usable, with several caveats. On the plus side: a €100 minimum, a configurable auto-invest, free deposits and withdrawals and a secondary market. Against it: secondary-market liquidity is limited given long terms and no buyback, 15% Lithuanian withholding tax is deducted (reducible to 10% via DAS-1), there is no tax report ready for a German return yet, and no dedicated German-language interface is advertised.

Data coverage and open questions

Our grade rests on 23 of 25 assessment questions that could be answered from solid sources — data coverage: good. On the plus side, the ECSP licence is verified in the supervisory register, and InSoil discloses portfolio, recovery and fee data in unusual detail. Two points remain open: an independently audited annual statement of the operating company could not be clearly confirmed publicly, and current 2024 figures are not available. The biggest real risk is not the structure but the performance: as long as roughly a fifth of the portfolio is still being worked out after default, the actually realised net return lags well behind the headlines — and whether the green/carbon loans deliver their projected returns cannot yet be evidenced, for lack of completed cycles.

Who is InSoil for?

InSoil suits investors who prefer secured real assets to a pure repurchase promise, who deliberately seek the agriculture and climate theme, and who can live with long terms, limited liquidity and slow repayment when loans default. Anyone who already uses P2P only as a small, well-diversified allocation and values regulation and real collateral will find a seriously run, unusually transparent offering here. Those who instead expect short terms, fast liquidity, a buyback guarantee or a predictably high net return will be disappointed — the high advertised interest only partly arrives net, and money can be tied up for longer than expected. P2P remains a high-risk investment: only invest money whose temporary loss you can absorb, and spread across several platforms and segments. Our knowledge article P2P lending basics explains the fundamentals.