Loans from people to people

What Vertaislaina24 is — and what it is not

Vertaislaina24 is a classifieds board. Two kinds of listing appear on it: a private individual saying they need a loan, and a private individual saying they are willing to lend money at interest. Everything after that first contact happens between the parties, without us.

We are not a lender and not a credit intermediary. We do not grant loans, do not score applicants, do not handle payments between the parties and take no commission from any agreement that results. The only charge is the fee for publishing a listing, and it is flat regardless of the size of the loan — the reasoning is on the pricing page.

The distinction matters both practically and legally. A P2P platform takes on the credit scoring, the money flow and the collection work, and charges a percentage for doing so. A classifieds board solves only the discovery problem and leaves everything else with the parties. That is where the low cost comes from, and also where the limits come from: we cannot promise that a counterparty is trustworthy, because we have not checked them, and we cannot recover lost money, because it never passed through us. Our position under Finnish law is set out on the legal status page.

The order the arrangement has to follow

The sequence is not a formality. Almost every bad outcome in private lending comes from two stages swapping places — money moving before the agreement exists, or an agreement being signed before the counterparty has been identified.

The order protects both sides. For a borrower it means never paying anything before the funds arrive; for an investor it means holding a signed document before the money leaves. Both steps are free, and it is skipping them that costs.

A listing runs for thirty days and most enquiries arrive in the first few of them. When it comes to the agreement, the clause list on loan agreement terms covers what has to be written down, and current listings can be browsed without registration on the board.

Peer-to-peer, instant credit and bank loans

The three are confused constantly in ordinary conversation, although they differ in both price and regulation. Knowing the difference is worth more than comparing headline rates.

A bank loan is the cheapest, but it requires a clean credit record, verifiable income and often security. The process is the slowest, and a refusal usually comes from automated scoring with no explanation attached.

Consumer instant credit from a licensed lender is the fastest and the most expensive. It is tightly regulated, the price appears in the annual percentage rate, and the short repayment period makes the instalment large even when the sum is small.

A loan between private individuals sits between the two. The rate is negotiated case by case rather than taken from a price list, and the decision rests on human judgement instead of a score — but there is no safety net: no ready-made contract, no automatic collection and no supervisor standing behind the terms. The full comparison is in the P2P loan guide.

Risks worth knowing before you start

The direct model is cheap because it moves the work and the risk onto the parties. That is an honest trade, but only if both sides know what they are taking on.

For an investor the principal risk is exactly that — the principal. A single unpaid loan wipes out the interest earned on several successful ones, and there is no provision fund or buyback guarantee behind a classifieds board. For a borrower the principal risk is oversizing: an instalment that is too large leads to late-payment interest, collection charges and eventually a payment default entry that follows them for years.

Both sides share a third risk: advance-fee fraud. If a counterparty asks for money before the loan is paid out, it is a scam without exception, whatever the payment is called — insurance, handling fee or notary deposit. The full list of signals is on the risks page.

A fourth risk is slower and therefore easier to ignore: the relationship. A loan inside a family or a friendship rarely becomes a problem immediately; it becomes one months later, when the first instalment is late and neither side wants to raise it. A written agreement is not a sign of distrust — it moves the awkward conversation to the beginning, so it does not have to happen at the end.