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 (7.2/10) 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 backed by audited accounts. 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 payment provider ConnectPay, a Lithuanian e-money institution also supervised by the Bank of Lithuania. Since the switch in May 2025 (previously Lemonway), every investor gets their own IBAN account there rather than a share of a pooled account. 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 Lithuanian agricultural loan guarantee fund is added: per rethink-p2p's analysis, the fund would repay up to 80% of the outstanding loan amount on default, an extra layer of protection that consumer-loan platforms do not offer. InSoil does not list the fund on its own product page for agricultural loans, so you will find the commitment only in the individual loan agreement. Gross interest ranges from 11.6% to 22.3% (weighted 13%), with terms of 11 to 48 months (36 on a weighted basis). 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. In June 2026, per the platform, the first proceeds from carbon-credit sales came through, but they went to the participating farmers. Whether and when such a premium reaches investors is not yet evidenced: the seven Green Loans repaid in the first quarter of 2026, and therefore before that sale, returned between 0.00% and 0.80% annualised. Beyond that, there is usually something to invest in, because InSoil continuously originates new loans. The offering does, however, rest on a single sector (agriculture) and a handful of countries, and performance varies sharply by market: Lithuania (86.1%) and Latvia (85.6%) are broadly on schedule, while Portugal (62.1%) and Poland (54.6%) are markedly 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 independent analyses; InSoil itself does not publish this figure. For that long your money is locked in the defaulted loan: it is usually not lost, since 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. At any time, a good fifth of the portfolio is not being serviced on schedule (in the first-quarter 2026 review, 22.2% was in arrears, of which 13.9% for more than 90 days), so 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 the loans fully repaid in the first quarter of 2026 returned 13.67% on average, independent analyses arrive at less for a whole portfolio: the author of rethink-p2p puts his own total return at 7.84%, and Jean Galea cites an analysis by BeyondP2P estimating the actual 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 August 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 ConnectPay. 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 (9/10). Here InSoil is among the most open platforms on the market: the largest gap in our initial assessment has closed. InSoil now publishes audited annual accounts for 2021 through 2025; the auditor and an unqualified opinion are named for each year, and the report for financial year 2025 is dated 26 March 2026. Its quarterly portfolio reviews show recovery rates by annual cohort, performance by rating grade and by country (a granularity most providers do not deliver), and the statistics page reports defaulted principal as a metric in its own right. Owners and management (CEO Laimonas Noreika, formerly FinBee) are named and fees are fully disclosed.

Not full marks, because the "13%" headline still sits well above the realised net return (even though InSoil itself discloses the very data that shows this) and because the reporting rhythm stays thin: five portfolio reviews have appeared since April 2025, and in early August 2026 none had yet appeared for the second quarter of 2026. One further change goes uncommented by InSoil: the 2024 accounts were audited by Grant Thornton Baltic, the 2025 accounts by a markedly smaller firm, in the first year with a negative pre-tax result. That is no failing in itself; both opinions are unqualified.

Track record & stability (6/10). Mixed: the new figures largely cancel each other out. On the plus side: InSoil has managed investor money since June 2020, has facilitated €109M and has over 16,000 investors; 2025 was its strongest year yet at €29.7M lent, and in June 2026 the credit investor Pollen Street Capital (over €8bn under management) committed a secured facility of €120M: scrutiny a small platform does not get for free. It weathered the agricultural crisis from 2022 (war, input costs, rate hikes) and communicated it transparently: withdrawals kept running and recovery progress is disclosed by cohort. Weighing against that, the now-audited accounts show no sustainable earnings path: after the €0.375M profit in 2023 came a €1.64M loss in 2024, and in 2025 the pre-tax result was still negative at −€0.18M: the reported net profit of €0.33M arises solely from a tax credit. Equity of €0.64M stands against €7.4M of liabilities, and headcount fell from 20 to 13. On top of that sits a growing recovery overhang from the crisis, markedly slower new lending in the first quarter of 2026, and dependence 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 via a dedicated IBAN account, 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. On top of that, the payment provider ConnectPay runs its own verification, and the withdrawal account has to be confirmed with a €1 transfer.

Data coverage and open questions

What cannot be said about InSoil with any confidence is how dependable its support is: only community signals exist there, no verifiable metrics. That is the single one of the 25 assessment questions we could not answer from solid sources. Data coverage: good. Both points left open at the initial assessment are settled: the audited annual accounts are now public, including the figures for 2024 and 2025. Also verified are the ECSP licence in the supervisory register and the unusually detailed portfolio, recovery and fee data. The biggest real risk is in any case not the structure but the performance: as long as a good fifth of the portfolio is in arrears or still being worked out after default, the actually realised net return lags well behind the headlines. Whether the green/carbon loans deliver their projected returns cannot yet be evidenced, for lack of completed cycles; the first Green Loans to be repaid returned investors effectively nothing.

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.