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investors
Hive5 is a peer-to-peer lending marketplace registered in Zagreb, Croatia, launched in July 2022, offering some of the highest advertised rates in Europe - 13 to 16 percent a year, averaging 14.4 percent - on short consumer and small-business loans of one to twenty-four months, from 10 euros per loan.
It is essential to understand what it is: not an independent marketplace but a funding channel for its own group. Hive5 belongs to the Lithuanian holding company Hive finance UAB, and every lending company whose loans it sells belongs to the same group - a Spanish consumer lender (FinJet), a Polish business lender (Firmeo) and a Romanian revolving-credit firm (Credilink).
Each loan carries a promise that the lender will buy it back if payments fall 60 days behind, backed by a group guarantee - but the guarantor holding company has reported negative equity every year since 2022, and the lending companies are capitalised at a few thousand euros each.
Hive5 holds no licence from any financial regulator, so there is no supervisor, no compensation scheme and no required safeguarding of client cash, whose custody arrangements are not disclosed.
The platform says 218 million euros has been invested by around 30,000 investors, with roughly 15 million euros out on loan at any time given the very short terms; its detailed statistics have not been updated since August 2025. Investing is free, with auto-invest, cashback for new investors and loyalty bonuses of up to 1 percent. Withdrawals have so far processed in one to two days, and no investor has yet lost money.
The group's co-founder and majority owner is Andrius Rupsys, a Lithuanian entrepreneur who built the vehicle-telematics firm Ruptela; Ricardas Vandzinskas is reported to hold the other 35 percent. The group chief executive since May 2026 is Krisjanis Znotins, with named heads of operations, marketing, finance and risk, and around 45 claimed staff. Oddly, the director recorded for the Croatian operating company in the official register - Aurimas Kacinskas - appears nowhere on the team page. Reviewers also document that the software Hive5 runs on was built by the majority owner's godfather, who owned Credon, a Croatian platform that froze investor withdrawals in 2023
The negative coverage is the most severe of any platform in this class that has not actually failed. Jean Galea, who once ranked Hive5 in his top three, withdrew his own money, delisted it and removed his affiliate links, describing a closed loop where investor capital can be routed wherever the insiders need it and drawing comparisons to the Envestio and Kuetzal collapses. German analyst re:think P2P titles its review Too Many Red Flags and advises against investing; P2P Empire scores platform risk 0.0 out of 10. Documented specifics include paid Trustpilot reviews at 25 euros each, a Dusseldorf law firm instructed against a critical German reviewer in July 2023, critical YouTube videos removed after complaints, and family and software links to Credon, which froze withdrawals in 2023. Against all that: no withdrawal problems, no missed payments and no regulator warning have ever been reported. The complaints are about what could happen, not what has.
Post-funding protection is one mechanism: if a payment is 60 days late, the group lender must buy the loan back with interest, and a group guarantee stands behind that. Its worth equals the group's balance sheet - and the filed accounts show the guarantor holding company with negative equity every year since 2022, buyback obligors capitalised at roughly 3,000 euros, and the only well-capitalised lender having left the platform in March 2025. What happens if a buyback fails - legal recourse, collection, whether investors hold any claim on the underlying borrower - is documented nowhere, and there is no plan published for what happens to loans if the platform itself stops operating.
There is no meaningful selection, because there is no third party to select. Hive5 lists loans from lending companies its own parent owns, so choosing originators and listing the shareholders' own subsidiaries are the same act. All borrower underwriting happens inside those lenders, and none of it is published - no credit criteria, no scorecards, no acceptance rates, no loan-level borrower detail and no risk grades. A group chief risk officer exists, but he works for the same group that owns both the lenders and the marketplace. No independent party anywhere assesses the credit investors are buying.
They largely cannot be assessed, and that is itself the finding. FinJet is 94.3 percent of the book, about EUR 16.6 million on the platform, and lends short-term, personal and business credit in Spain through Nectar Capital SL, a Malaga company with three employees formerly named Mana Concept SL. It files no standalone accounts an investor can read. Credilink, a Romanian consumer lender trading as We Finance IFN SA, and Firmeo, a Polish SME lender, publish nothing either, and Credilink currently has nothing outstanding on the platform. Ekspres Pozyczka, the Polish lender that once disclosed a 5.6 percent default rate, left in March 2025. What does get published is the parent. Hive Finance Group, audited by UAB Veritas Auditas, turned its first profit in 2024, EUR 55,000 on revenue of EUR 11.5 million and total assets of EUR 11.98 million, after losses of EUR 755,000 in 2022 and EUR 410,000 in 2023. The guarantor standing behind the 60-day buyback, Hive finance UAB, reported negative equity of minus EUR 169,226 at the end of 2025. Management has also called the business profitable in years when the filed accounts showed losses.
There are no direct fees - no charges to deposit, invest or withdraw, and no currency costs since everything is in euros. The real costs are indirect. Idle cash waiting for loans costs a measured median of 1.7 percent a year. Tax is entirely your problem: a downloadable report exists but nothing is withheld, and the treatment is not documented. And the structural cost is invisible: borrowers pay the group's lending brands far more than the 13 to 16 percent passed to investors, and the whole margin stays with the same owners who set your rate - no competing lender bids it up.
