Mintos Review 2024: My Results after 6 Years

I love to diversify my Peer-to-Peer lending investments on as many great platforms as possible. Mintos was the second Peer-to-Peer lending platform I ever invested in, and now several years later it is time to make a detailed review of the platform & show you the current state of my Mintos Peer-to-Peer lending portfolio.

In this article, I will tell you what I think are the biggest strengths of the platform, and what is the state of my current portfolio on the platform. I’ll also share how to get started on the platform, and the investment strategy that I am currently using on Mintos.

What is Mintos?

Mintos is a Peer-to-Peer platform based in Latvia and is currently the largest Peer-to-Peer lending platform in Europe, with over 8 billion Euros worth of loans funded since the creation of the platform. They currently have over 488.000 investors, coming from all over the world. They also reached profitability back in 2017, which is a very good sign for a Peer-to-Peer lending platform. 

Mintos is actually a marketplace for loans, meaning that they are working with several loan originators to propose loans to the marketplace. They currently have 64 different loans originators, meaning that investors can diversify their investments in several countries, and also several loan types.

They also won several awards of the years, including the AltFi's 'People's Choice Award' for three years in a row, and they have a very good rating of 4 stars over 5 on Trustpilot, meaning it's a platform that is really popular amongst its users.

What Returns Can I Expect From Mintos?

On their homepage, Mintos advertises a 11.5% average return for their investors. My personal return over the past years is currently at 11.48%, which is really close to the rate they advertise. I've also been investing in the platform since August 2015, and the returns have always been consistent. As for all my reviews, you will also find more details about my current returns with Mintos at the end of this article.

Is It Safe to Invest on Mintos?

As for all investments, investing in Mintos comes with a risk. That's why I always check platforms that I invest in on three points: the platform itself, the company & the team behind the platform, and their loan originators.

The Platform

There are many things that are included on Mintos to make sure that you only take a reduced amount of risk when investing on the platform.

The one thing in terms of safety that really sets Mintos aside is that they received an investment firm license in 2021, making it the first platform of this kind to receive such a license:

This is a really good point for the safety of investors money, as it certifies they have to follow a lot of rules to manage the money from investors. 

Following the obtention of this license, they also started to offer financial instruments on their platform that are called Notes:

Basically, Notes are groups of individual loans that are packaged together into a financial instrument. This means instant diversification for the investor, as you invest in several loans at once every time. Compared to investing in individual loans, Notes also provide a more stable income for the investors.

Because of Mintos being a regulated platforms, all funds you have on the platform are also guaranteed by the investor compensation schema, up to 20,000 Euros. 

Finally, as I already mentioned earlier, the fact that it is the largest platform in Europe & that they have some many loan originators means that it is really easy to have a very diversified portfolio on Mintos, reducing even more the level of risk on your investment.

The Company & the Team

Next, I also checked the company itself, and the team running it.

First, I checked that the company was actually registered in Latvia, and I could indeed find it in the company registry of the country.

I also tried to find who is actually working at Mintos, and it was really easy to find some of the key employees from the main page of their site:

I also checked the profiles of the management team of Mintos, for example of their CEO Martins Sulte. Before co-founding Mintos, he actually spent over 6 years as an investment banker at SEB, which is a large banking group that is present in Scandinavian countries & the Baltics. This shows that he definitely has experience in the field of investing.

I also talked with him several times over Skype calls, whereas it was for my Youtube channel & podcast or just to talk about Mintos, and for sure he is someone that knows what he is talking about.

Loan Originators

Let's now talk about loan originators that are present on Mintos. I appreciated the fact that the platform is fully transparent about the loan originators that they use, and they even made a really nice page where you can explore they current loan originators:

As for many other Peer-to-Peer lending platform, they had some issues during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 and 2021, and several loan originators had issues as well. However, they communicated very well with investors on the matter (where other platforms were really silent), and now all the issues have been resolved. They also introduced their own risk score for loan originators, which is really useful to set the level of risk you want on your portfolio.

I also like the fact that they have over 60 different loan originators from all over the globe, meaning you can get a really diversified portfolio on Mintos.

Getting Started on Mintos

Getting started with Mintos is really simple. First, what you need to do is to open a free account on their website. This usually takes less than 5 minutes, including a step where they will ask you to verify your identity. 

Once your account is created & verified, you can then browse loans that are available on the platform. The next step is then to deposit money on your account to start investing. This is also really easy to do, as they provide different bank accounts that you can use to make them a transfer, depending on which currency you want to use. I used TransferWise to make my deposits, and the money arrived on the platform & was ready to use in just one day.

You have two different ways to invest on Mintos: manually by browsing sets of Notes, or using auto-invest strategies. 

They actually provide a very nice explorer for sets of notes, which is great to explore all options that are available on the platform:

Note that they also have a secondary market, where you can buy Notes from other investors at a discount, but also resell your own investments if you want to exit some of your positions on the platform.

Let’s now see how to automate your investments on Mintos. At the start, as I always recommend, I was investing manually in loans to see what were the different parameters. However, I recommend to quickly start using the auto-invest function, as it will allow you to completely automate your investments on the platform and have a truly passive investment. 

On Mintos, you have the choice between three pre-defined strategy with various levels of risk, and you can also create your own custom strategy:

With this strategy, I still had nearly 1000 sets of notes available to be invested in, meaning my money for sure will be invested automatically by this strategy.

As for all platforms I review, I tried to withdraw money from the platform as well. This went without any issues, and I had the money in my bank account in one day.

My Current Results With Mintos

Let’s now have a look at my current results with Mintos. Note that I started investing on the platform around August 2015.

So far, I managed to get an annual return of 11.48% on my investments. This number was slightly lower than that during the COVID-19 crisis, as Mintos was hit by the crisis like most platforms, which resulted in some payments being delayed on the platform and therefore a lower yield. However, they did good efforts in recovering all the money that was not paid back on time, and in 2022 the yield picked up again and it slowly going back to around 12%.

Overall, I can say that I still got very solid results from Mintos after all those years of investing on the platform. Of course, I will update this section regularly as I have more results coming from the platform.