This is LANDE's first Platform Performance Report, part of a new series that we will publish around the middle of every month to highlight our progress in loan issuance and debt collection, as well as other internal or technical updates. 

The total amount issued to farmers on the LANDE platform in March 2024 was €1,022,561 across 39 projects. The breakdown by country is as follows:  

91 new investors registered on the LANDE Platform in March. 

LANDE investors earned a total of €79,940 in interest in March, getting to a total of €1.36 million. 

Loan repayments 

Out of a total of 956 projects funded through the LANDE platform, 421 have been repaid in full while 535 are active, with their repayment status detailed below: 

In Latvia, 3 loans were fully repaid in March by repeat LANDE clients. Out of 6 clients with scheduled final payments in April, 4 have already made the final repayment, and 2 are expected to do so by the end of the month. 

In Lithuania, 1 repeat LANDE client fully repaid their loan in March, with 2 repeat clients scheduled to finalize the repayment process in April. 

In Romania, there were no active loans that finalized their repayment process in March. 2 projects are scheduled for final repayments in April.  

A total of 49 projects have been labelled with the default status across LANDE markets by our debt collection teams, after all soft recovery processes were exhausted. 

Read more about LANDE's loan protection and debt collection practices here.  

Following our IT team's hard work on fixing data errors and correcting user balances and transactions, we had a 31% decrease in the number of customer support tickets in March versus February, and the downward trend continues. 

Market updates 

There has been significant improvement to the debt collection process recently across the LANDE markets, including expansion of the dedicated teams in each country, new procedures aiming to make the process more efficient, as well as technical updates to the platform and connected software to streamline operations.   

Latvia 

On LANDE's home market, a new debt recovery process has been developed in cooperation with the notary, which helps us avoid lengthy litigation processes, providing an opportunity to submit the enforcement document directly to bailiffs.  

Furthermore, a new cooperation has been developed with two new attorneys, ensuring that we'll be able to move faster with court cases and have a broader view. 

In court cases, we've developed a new peaceful settlement procedure that also speeds up the process. After the trial date is set, LANDE encourages the debtor to sign the peaceful settlement. The document gets approved by the court in the first appearance and can be submitted to the bailiff if a scheduled payment is delayed by more than 60 days. 

In terms of customer behaviour, LANDE's Latvia team has noticed that farmers have started to hold on to their harvests in the hope to obtain a better price later on in the year, as recent market prices have been rather low. 

Lithuania 

The Lithuania team welcomed a new Debt & Sales Lawyer to work exclusively with debtors, making it possible to adopt a new debtor management approach to communicate more closely with those who have delayed payments (phone calls/SMS/emails in the first days of delay) to find out what's causing their issues. This has already helped decrease new debtors and average late days. 

New external partnerships include an attorney who has taken over all legal cases and enforcement actions and will update the LANDE team weekly on the entire debtor portfolio, as well as a monitoring company who will conduct thorough checks of borrowers’ credit scores to prevent payment delays and defaults. 

Actions have also been taken to improve investment protections. Besides collateral, each client now provides one or more bills of exchange depending on loan schedule, which provides double protection and allows us to quickly start property and asset seizures together with the bailiff (average time from first inquiry to seizing: 20-30 days).  

The pre-lawsuit documentation gathering process has been made more efficient as well, now taking a maximum of 2 days from default decision to claim preparation. Courts in Lithuania accept claims within 10-14 days and decisions are obtained within 1 month on average, to be immediately followed by bailiff intervention. In cases that have both pledge and bill of exchange this process moves even faster (20-30 days until all assets and property are seized). 

Romania 

Following a brief pause in financing due to a delay in LANDE's permanent authorization process as a Crowdfunding Service Provider, March saw great momentum in terms of demand from farmers and enthusiasm from platform investors.  

All loans granted since financing was resumed on this market have had a promissory note alongside the regular collateral agreement. This is a payment instrument that allows the creditor to enforce seizures with a bailiff without meeting any other legal requirements, such as initiating a court case. This will help the team expedite enforcement procedures. 

We have initiated the first enforcement procedures on the Romania market, with the local courts having granted all our requests so far. To support such processes, we've started to work with a company that specializes in identifying, collecting, and storing agricultural equipment, and the first such seizure has already been carried out from a defaulted client.  

Furthermore, our debt collection specialists deployed advanced negotiation techniques and managed to obtain additional collateral from debtors who are behind on payments. This will aid in the enforcement procedure so that when the auction stage is reached, the assets sold from the debtors’ estates will cover their debt.