Mintos Review 2022
Table of Content
If you are tired of low-interest savings accounts and are looking for interesting alternatives that can increase your investment by at least 8% per year, Mintos might be a good option for you.
The Mintos marketplace is a Latvian P2P platform that connects investors that want to invest money with loan originators that want to finance their loans.
You are eligible to invest on Mintos if you are over 18 years old and reside in any country but the UK. UK investors aren’t currently allowed to invest on Mintos. You also have to have a European Bank account. I use the N26 account to transfer funds to Mintos, but you can also use TransferWise or Revolut.
You can start investing from only €10. Your investment is secured by a buyback obligation, meaning the loan originator promises to repurchase your claim against the borrower in case the borrower’s payment is delayed for more than 60 days.
Depending on your automated investment strategy on Mintos, you have the option to withdraw most of your funds within a few minutes during normal market conditions, given the scenario that you don’t have any funds in “recovery”.
Check out this video to learn about the latest facts surrounding Mintos
Is investing on Mintos safe?
Many people keep asking me “how safe is Mintos?”
Here are a few things you should know about the protection of your investment.
- Suspensions: Mintos does its due diligence about loan originators monitors them on a “regular” basis. The monitoring process isn’t as transparent and it’s not uncommon that lending companies get suspended. You should not be relying on Mintos to protect your investments.
- Credit Scoring: Loan originators evaluate each loan application based on different metrics such as credit score, borrowers’ income, etc. Each loan originator invests its own money (mostly between 5%-10%) in the loans of their borrowers. This is also called “Skin in the game” and it ensures that the loan originator is interested in retrieving the debt if the borrower fails to pay back on time. The financial reports of those loan originators are not always audited or outdated which makes it hard for the investors to evaluate their due diligence and credit scoring.
- Country Risk: Mintos is listing loans from emerging markets with a variety of regulatory requirements. It’s important to understand that the lending business in Central America, Africa, or South East Asia is very different from Europe. Investors should always keep country-relevant risks in mind before investing in high-yielding loans offered by Mintos’ business partners. Investors on Mintos have already suffered losses due to “revokation of lending licenses” or the “devaluation of local currencies” which are both country-relevant risks.
You should be aware of the risks before you sign up and invest on Mintos.
When reviewing any European P2P lending platforms you should always have a look at the platform’s statistics. Statistics will always give you an idea about the P2P platform’s performance as well as its growth.
| Mintos Statistics | |
|---|---|
| Operating since: | 2015 |
| Investor’s earnings: | + €174 M |
| Total loan value: | + €7.47 B |
| Amount of investors: | +453.000 |
As you can clearly see, Mintos is the leader in Peer to Peer lending in Europe with the largest amount of investors by far. Keep in mind that the amount of registered investors doesn’t represent the number of active investors which is a more relevant metric that’s unfortunately not publicly available.
For more details and financial KPIs, refer to the Mintos’ loan statistics.
Let’s have a look at the reasons why you could potentially invest on Mintos as well as some issues that you should be aware of.
Pros
- Secondary Market for early withdrawals
- Mintos Investment Strategies for higher liquidity
- Mintos Risk Score for more insights about Loan Originators
Cons
- Suspended lenders
- Conflict of interest between lenders and owners of Mintos
- Some lending companies don’t pay interest for delayed loans
- Lower yield
Mintos Diversification
For a long period, Mintos was by far the best P2P lending platform in my portfolio when it came to diversification options (back in 2019).
Recent shortages of loans, however, made many functions such as the Mintos Auto Invest quite limited.
Having the option to diversify your portfolio is great if there are enough investments that suit your criteria. Due to the popularity of Mintos, the platform could not always keep up with the supply of loans which is why they onboarded new lenders in 2021 and developed the Mintos Strategies to make you invest in almost everything.
The custom automated strategy on Mintos offers the following diversification options:
9 loan types
38 countries
107 loan originators
12 currencies
Loan period from 1 to 72 months
Interest from 5% – 30%
Buyback Obligation
Mintos Risk Score
Mintos is always changing its investment tools. The Mintos Strategies (former Mintos Auto Invest), are predefined investment preferences that help you spread your investments in suitable loans without dealing with more advanced diversification settings.
There are however a few drawbacks with the automated strategies.
New features have often a higher priority over your custom strategy, which doesn’t leave many loans left, that fit your criteria. Apart from this, your diversification settings are also limited.
In recent months, Mintos (or its lenders) has lowered the interest for the loans they are listing on the platform. You can now expect to earn between 7% and 9% interest per year by using the Mintos strategies. This return is 4% lower than just two to three years ago, while the risk remained largely the same.
Mintos Risk & Returns
You can expect to earn around 8% per year on your invested amount. The expected profit you will see in your dashboard is a dynamic value that is changing frequently as you automatically reinvest your profits.
The return depends obviously on the loans (or strategies) that you decide to follow. If you decide to chase the highest yields you will have to expose yourself to emerging markets and foreign currencies. This means that you will bear additionally the foreign currency risk as well as the country risk that comes with emerging markets (uncertain regulatory environment).
When looking at the risks, that we have discussed at the beginning of this review, most investors are ready to accept those risk for an average return of 12% per year (which isn’t the case on Mintos anymore).
Even myself, I manage to earn around 10% to 11% per year on other platforms with lower risk levels as on Mintos. If you are looking for a great risk and reward ratio in the P2P lending segment, Mintos isn’t the best in this field, even though the platform is regulated in Latvia.
Mintos Functionality
Having a user-friendly P2P site is the key to keep investors happy. Mintos is easily the most innovative platform in the European market. Many other platforms try to copy some of the features of Mintos if they prove to be valuable.
Mintos risk score represent the loan originators' risk profile. You can use this information when setting-up your investment strategies. It shouldn't be the only source of information though. Following the latest news and analyzing the latest financial performance of your lenders should be exercised regularly.
Most of the investors invest on Mintos through the primary market. The secondary market allows you to sell your investments before the end of the loan period. Note that there is a fee of 0.85% for sellers on the secondary market.
The Mintos statistics are the most valuable statistics within European P2P platforms. It’s the perfect place to get an idea about the past performance of Mintos. You can either use the loan statistics or evaluate some of the historical data.
Mintos allows you to exchange currencies or invest in foreign currencies. There are no hidden fees and you can see right away how much money you get.
The Mintos custom strategy is the most developed automated investment tool on the market.
Transferring funds to Mintos takes just a few hours during business hours.
Here are some of the features that you won’t find on many other platforms.
1. Mintos Risk Score
2. Secondary market
3. Statistics
4. Currency Conversion
5. Auto Invest - Custom Strategy
6. Fastest money transfer
Keep in mind that while Mintos is innovating a lot, it can often cause bugs or frustration when certain features change. While Mintos does offer a lot of data that will help you make more data-driven investment decisions, sometimes it also likes to hide certain valuable information such as the comments section on Mintos’ blog posts or information about funds in recovery from suspended lenders.
Mintos Support
A Mintos review without mentioning their customer support wouldn’t be a complete Mintos review. The P2P site offers solid customer support in comparison to other European P2P platforms. The response time is fast (if you use the live chat function). During working hours you can chat with an employee at Mintos within seconds.
I have used their support when I had questions about my Auto Invest settings or new features. The response was always to the point. Mintos won’t simply refer you to their FAQ or blog posts. At least this wasn’t my experience.
My Experience with Mintos since 2017
I signed up on Mintos in July 2017 and transferred my first € 100 to test the platform. As soon as I gained trust with Mintos and became familiar with the platform, I regularly transferred more funds to Mintos.
Until 2020 I built two portfolios worth more than €30,000. The net annual return was at the time at 10.35% which was below the historical average of 12.16%.
My Mintos portfolio was automated via Mintos Auto Invest (custom automated strategy), a function that allows you to automate your investment strategy so you don’t have to spend your time and invest manually.
Here is a sneak peek into one of my old portfolios on Mintos before they introduced “funds in recovery”.
Mintos was a great platform back in the days with solid features and reliable returns. This latest until 2020 when the platform started suspending lenders due to the effect of the pandemic on Mintos’ business partners.
Many lenders owned by Mintos’ shareholder Aigars Kesenfelds also got suspended from the marketplace (Varks, etc.) and millions of investors’ funds got stuck in “limbo” or “recovery”. Some investors, myself included, noticed some of the first red flags and changes of terms and conditions which put investors in a disadvantageous position which led to the exit of my portfolio on this platform.
I managed to exit most of my portfolio in 2020 and today I have just about €50 in recovery. Which is basically nothing in relation to my entire P2P lending portfolio.
Unfortunately, not many investors had such a “good” experience with Mintos as today there are over €66M in recovery from suspended lenders and over €18M locked from the temporary suspensions of Wowwo loans in Turkey.
Mintos Review Summary
This Mintos review should not convince you to invest all your savings in Mintos, but rather share my experience with this European P2P lending platform.
Mintos was one of my preferred alternative platforms in the past, mainly due to the fact that I could diversify my investment across several countries and various loan originators. While there are still plenty of investors who keep using the platform, you should not underestimate the risks associated with Mintos or P2P lending in general.
I had actually talked to the Mintos CEO in 2021 and discussed the changes and lessons from 2020 and he shared with me (off the record) that he believes that investors invest too much money in P2P loans. That’s certainly something to think about.
If you want to read a more in-depth review about Mintos, head over to P2P Empire.
Bah,
I was excited to try so signed up and sent €100 to them. When I went to invest I could not as they gave pulled the plug on UK citizens. Must be this Brexit bullshit. They say they are sorting something out for UK citizens but give no time frame.
sorry to hear that Harry.. yeah they put the registration for UK residents on hold, have you tried EstateGuru yet? They allow residents from the UK to sign up. You can also read more about suitable P2P lending platforms for UK residents here: https://kubasjourneys.com/p2p-lending-in-europe-for-u-s-uk-investors/
Nothing to do with Brexit and to do with not meeting the demands of the UK Financial Conduct Authority
FCA decision there are several points that led to the refusal:
a) the applying company does not currently meet the minimal funding requirements of 50K GBP as specified by the rules (paragraphs 49-50 of the notice)
b) the head office of the applying company is not currently in the UK (51-53)
c) the FCA has doubts that the Mintos business model will be adapted adaquately to comply with the UK regulation rules (paragraphs 29-33, 35-38, 40)
d) the FCA find Mintos wind-down plans are not specific enough (41-44)
e) the FCA is not satisfied with Mintos’ understanding of the UK rules (46-48)
Mintos security system Is a joke. My account has been hackered money Stolen and they refused to refund me.
Absolutely not safe
Stay away