From application to your feed: how CrowdHive due diligence works

Every project goes through full due diligence before it reaches your feed. That is not a slogan: it is a sequence of checks that starts the moment a business applies for funding and does not really end until the loan is repaid. In this article we walk through that sequence step by step, so you can see what happens between "a company wants to borrow" and "a project card appears in your CrowdHive feed" - and, just as important, what due diligence does not promise.

One clarification before we start. Due diligence is not an audit. An audit is a formal, standardised examination performed by an external auditor under professional rules. Our review is deeper in some places and narrower in others: it is focused on a single question - can this specific business repay this specific loan on these specific terms? It reduces uncertainty, it does not remove it. The credit risk of every project stays with the investor.

What we actually look at

Across every stage, the review keeps coming back to four things: who owns the business, what its accounts actually show, which customers and suppliers it depends on, and how it generates the cash to repay. Everything below is a way of answering those four questions with documents instead of promises.

Stage 1: first screening

Most applications do not get past this stage. The first pass filters out businesses that are outside our scope before anyone spends weeks on analysis. We look at the basics: is the borrower a legal entity (CrowdHive lends to businesses only, never to private individuals), does it have an operating history, does the requested amount make sense against the size of the business, and is there a clearly identifiable source of repayment rather than a general hope that revenue will appear.

A concrete example. An engineering and construction contractor applying to finance work under a signed contract with a named client is a very different conversation from a company raising money "for growth". The first has a repayment source you can read on paper. The second does not, and it usually stops here.

Stage 2: KYB and AML checks

Before any financial analysis, we have to know exactly who we are dealing with. As a member of SRO VQF, supervised under Article 24 of the Swiss Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA), BellaVista Invest One AG is required to identify every borrower and the people behind it. This is the KYB stage - know your business - and it runs on documents, not declarations:

• Registry extracts. A recent extract from the commercial register (no older than three months) confirming that the company exists, is active, and is represented by the people who signed the application.
• Beneficial owners. Identification of every individual who ultimately owns 25 percent or more of the business, traced through holding structures if necessary. Anonymous ownership is a hard stop.
• Sanctions and PEP screening. The company, its owners and its representatives are checked against sanctions lists, and we establish whether any of them is a politically exposed person, which triggers enhanced scrutiny.

These checks are a regulatory obligation, not a marketing feature. A borrower that cannot show clean, current ownership documentation does not move to the next stage, no matter how attractive the business looks.

Stage 3: financial analysis

Now the accounts. We review the borrower's financial statements to understand what the business actually earns, what it owes, and how much room it has to take on new debt. Three questions dominate:

• What do the accounts actually show? Revenue and margins over time, not just the latest good quarter. We look for consistency between what management says and what the numbers say.
• What is the existing debt load? A loan that looks serviceable on its own can be unserviceable on top of obligations the borrower already carries. We map existing liabilities before adding a new one.
• Where does repayment cash come from? This is the core of the whole review. For most projects on CrowdHive the answer is a specific, contracted cash flow rather than general revenue. A contractor building a new data hall for an operating data center repays from the client's staged payments under a signed construction contract. A lending business repays from collections on the loan and factoring portfolio the financing builds. A site developer repays from the sale of the finished facility to a buyer who has already committed to purchase it.

Because most current projects use a bullet structure - monthly interest during the term, principal in one payment at maturity - we pay particular attention to whether the repayment event is realistic in timing, not just in amount. How bullet repayment works from the investor's side is a topic of its own: see our guide to bullet loans.

Stage 4: contracts and collateral

If the repayment source is a contract, the contract gets read. Line by line. Who are the counterparties, what exactly triggers each payment, what happens if the client delays, can the agreement be terminated early and on what terms. A repayment source is only as strong as the paper behind it.

The same stage covers verification points outside the contract itself. For infrastructure projects, we look for independent confirmations that the project can physically proceed: for example, a data center project in a market where power is the binding constraint should be able to show a preliminary power allocation approved by the national grid operator before construction financing makes sense. A committed purchase agreement for a finished site tells us the exit is contracted, not hoped for. Ownership of the underlying land or a long-term lease on the building tells us the borrower controls the asset it is building on.

Collateral is assessed in the same pass: what security is available, how it is valued, and how it could realistically be enforced if things go wrong. What that enforcement looks like in practice, and how the Claim Purchase Agreement fits into the picture, is covered in how your investment is protected.

Can this specific business repay this specific loan on these specific terms? Every stage of the review answers that one question.

Stage 5: structuring - grade, rate, term

Only after all of the above does a project get its shape. Structuring turns the analysis into the terms you see on the project card: the loan amount, the term, whether funds are released in tranches tied to project milestones, the collateral package, and the risk grade.

The grade and the interest rate move together. On CrowdHive, AAA projects pay 5-7 percent, AA 7-9 percent, A 9-12 percent, BBB 12-15 percent, BB 15-17 percent, and B 17 percent and above. A higher rate is not a gift: it is compensation for risk the analysis has identified and priced. A project offering 17 percent carries meaningfully more risk than one offering 7, and the grade is there to say so plainly. Many of the platform's first projects sit at the higher end of that scale, financing data center and lending infrastructure in Latin America - a segment we discuss in why the AI boom runs on debt.

Tranching deserves a separate word. Where a project's needs unfold over time, funds are released in stages rather than in one payment. That is a due diligence tool as much as a financing structure: each release is a checkpoint where progress can be verified before more capital is committed.

Stage 6: after the loan is issued

Due diligence does not stop at disbursement. Through the life of the loan we monitor whether interest payments arrive on schedule and whether the repayment source is developing as expected: is the construction milestone met, is the portfolio performing, is the buyer still committed. If a borrower misses payments, BellaVista Invest One AG acts as Collateral Agent and conducts recovery on behalf of investors under the Debt Collection Procedure - individual investors do not need to pursue the borrower in court themselves.

What due diligence does not mean

A project appearing in your feed means it passed every stage above. It does not mean the loan cannot default. Contracts can be breached, clients can fail, markets can turn. Due diligence is a filter, not a guarantee, and no review can eliminate credit risk. The decision to invest, and the risk of that decision, remains yours - which is exactly why diversification across projects and grades matters more than any single project's analysis.

Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. BellaVista Invest One AG facilitates lending to businesses and does not provide investment advice.