From the launch Fellow Finance will offer its services for individual borrowers and plans to introduce a business loan option for companies in the future.

“We are thrilled to be in the Swedish market as our expansion to Sweden is a natural part of our strategy to become the leading crowdfunding and crowdlending platform in Europe. We see a great potential in Sweden and are happy to introduce the benefits of peer to peer lending for borrowers as well as for investors.” tells Jouni Hintikka, the group CEO.

Fellow Finance is the only service where an investor can easily invest in business loans and consumer loans across several countries and by doing so get a broad cross-border and multiple asset diversification for investments. The mission of Fellow Finance is to transform the traditional balance sheet bank lending to direct lending between individuals and companies.

”We make investing and borrowing easy, reliable and transparent. When comparing Fellow Finance with the traditional financing channels such as banks and lending institutions the significant difference is that investors will bid in an auction to fund the loan. For the borrower this means that he will always get the lowest offers for his loan. For investors the platform offers an opportunity to invest directly in consumer and business loans and thus diversify investments easily in many loans” Hintikka continues.

From its founding in 2014 Fellow Finance has intermediated over 270 million euros of funding between investors and borrowers and its volume makes it the biggest loan-based crowdfunding and peer to peer lending service in the Nordics (source: Altfi). Fellow Finance serves borrowers in Finland, Sweden, Germany and Poland and has investors from 50 different countries. The market share of Fellow Finance in 2017 in Finland was 39% (source: Bank of Finland).

”Our fast growth shows us that a customer friendly and transparent service approach is highly valued among our customers and is in high demand in all the markets we operate in. The borrowers who have received funding through our platform have appreciated the ease-of-use when applying for the loan and the opportunity to get the best quotes from investors. Investors on their behalf have been very satisfied with the opportunity to invest easily in an alternative asset class that doesn’t correlate with the more traditional asset classes such as stock and bond investments” Hintikka says.

Operating a crowdlending and crowdfunding platform in Sweden requires Payment Institution authorization. Fellow Finance is a Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority authorized Payment Institution which provides its services within EU and EEA area cross border from Finland to Sweden and has been registered in the register of supervised companies (Företagsregistret) of Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen).