Mintos is one of Europe’s largest peer to peer lending platforms. As you all know by now, I’ve been reluctant to invest too much into this type of asset in the past. Until now. Since a few months I invest through Mintos, and I’m quite happy so far! Today you can read all about my personal Mintos review!
Table of contents
Who is Mintos?
Mintos is a peer to peer lending company based in Latvia. They offer a platform that brings loan originators (those who have loaned money) and investors like you and me (who want to buy these loans) together.
They call themselves the biggest crowd lending platform in Europe, with around 160,000 investors and 1.8 billion euros worth of loans in the past 12 months.
A Quick Intro to Peer To Peer Lending
Peer to peer lending is the act of individual investors lending money to others (instead of a bank lending money). Mintos is bringing together loan originators (not the ultimate borrower) and the investor.
This means you’re not giving loans to people and businesses directly. With some crowd lending platforms this is the case, but with Mintos you’re investing in loans that are already in place.
Let’s say someone wanted to borrow money for a car. The lender, could be a bank, wants to move these loans off balance sheet by selling off the loan to investors. Sometimes banks do this to be compliant with regulations.
By offering their loans on a platform like Mintos, or Grupeer, they can divest out of the loan while offering the investor some pretty nice returns.
Types of Loans Mintos Offers
The many loan originators active on Mintos offer a lot of different loan types. Currently, I invest in mortgage loans, car loans, consumer loans, agricultural loans, and short-term loans.
When you create your auto-invest strategy you can pick the types of loans you want to invest in. I didn’t specify, because I’m happy with the diversification by investing in all kinds of different loan types.
Mintos Auto-Invest
Luckily Mintos offers an auto-invest option, because I don’t like to be logging in and buying loans all day. Since I want maximum diversification I want to invest only 10 euros per project and it’s not feasible to do this manually (hundreds of loans).
The Mintos auto-invest functionality enables me to invest hands-off. I’ve set it to buy all loans that are over 10% interest rate, shorter than 6 months in duration, and offer buyback guarantee.
Every day, this auto-invest buys loans with my available balance. The nice thing is you get an email every day with a summary of what happened.
Invest & Access
Mintos Invest & Access is meant to be the next level of automatic crowd lending. You simply tell the system to invest a maximum of X euros, and it does this completely automatically.
It almost feels like investing in an index funds of peer to peer loans. You simply add money to your Mintos account, and they’ll invest it for you. An added benefit is that you can sell out of your investments pretty easily.
This is great, because it makes your investments much more liquid.
Mintos Buyback Guarantee
Just like Grupeer, on most loans, Mintos offers a buyback guarantee. This means that the loan originator will buy back non-performing loans.
Non-performing loans on Mintos are defined as loans that are 60 days behind schedule. Of course, it’s a risk to you, but this risk is mitigated quite well.
If a loan originator can’t pay, then your investments will see a loss. Another risk is the cash drag you might have on your non-performing part of your portfolio. These loans are not paying out any interest or principal, so this money isn’t working for you.
I see that quite some loans on Mintos are behind schedule, more than 10% is >16 days late. Honestly, I don’t like that. Even with the buyback guarantee (I know it’s unlikely I will lose principal) I simply don’t want non-performing loans.
I’m moving all investments from my regular auto-invest strategy to Mintos Invest & Access. Hopefully that will perform better. In the meantime, I’m keeping a close watch on these loans.
Interest Rates on Mintos
The interest rates on Mintos are really good. On my regular auto-invest
With the new Invest & Access scheme, Mintos is offering a headline interest rate of 11.2% which I’m fine with, if these loans are performing and my portfolio is as liquid as they promise.
My Investment Strategy
My current Mintos investment strategy consists of a single auto-invest rule. The filters are simple. I want loans that have durations shorter than six months, because I want to have a liquid portfolio. I want them to yield at least 10%, because I want to be paid for the risk I take, and I want them to have a buyback guarantee.
With that strategy, I am diversified across many different loans. However, it feels like lately a lot of these loans are being paid late. That means that I have to change something. Maybe I’m too aggressive, who knows.
In the near future I will be switching over to Mintos Invest & Access completely to be 100% hands-off and have full liquidity.
Mintos Review Conclusion
I definitely like Mintos. They’re the number one peer to peer lending platform in Europe. Mintos makes things very easy for me and I like easy investments.
If you’d ask me, I’d definitely recommend signing up to their platform if you want to start investing in crowd lending. Please use my link to sign up, so that I might receive a small compensation. This helps me run this blog. It’s a win-win, if you liked my article ;-).
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7 thoughts on “Mintos Review – Peer To Peer Investment Platform”
I started to invest on the same platform just to experiment a bit, today I have found this article on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/acvngv/p2p_lending_is_a_scam_change_my_mind/
What are your thoughts on that? Do you think this can be related to Europe as well?
This is one of the first articles I read and, while it was helpful, I agree with Gnòtul about the quality vs quantity risk. I remember hearing in the podcast that you work on the blog either before work, or on the train to/from work (not sure which of you did which), so that gives you limited time. I write code on the train and while it forces me to get it done before arriving at the destination (no distractions as often happens at home), but I can tell you, it’s not always pretty code :D.
To be a bit more concrete, some of the text is colloquial language and skips over details. “I see that quite some loans on Mintos are behind schedule, more than 10% is >16 days late. Honestly, I don’t like that.” I might write that to a friend in instant messaging, but not in a published review, and it also doesn’t mention why you care. It does go on to say “I simply don’t want non-performing loans.” but how is a paid back loan non-performing? You never mentioned how long the loans are for (you only mentioned up to 6 months) and, unless it’s a loan of like 30 days in the first place, 16 days doesn’t sound very late to me for investments. Invoices are usually due after 14 or 30 days because those couple of days don’t make a difference, and in investments that go over much longer periods of time… It could have been written as “Quite some loans on Mintos are behind schedule: more than 10% is >16 days late. This reduces my real interest rate by X% because [reason/calculation].”
The Invest&Access thing is also a bit short: you explain it as “You simply tell the system to invest a maximum of X euros and it does this completely automatically.” How is that different from what you’ve been talking about up to that point (“The Mintos auto-invest functionality enables me to invest hands-off.”)? The previous thing had some more buttons like different loan types, but if you leave those default, that’s the same thing right? I can go and look it up, but then I might as well not read the blog post in the first place.
So those are just some examples, maybe it helps to understand how I personally read the text. It sounds a bit colloquial, terse sometimes, and has a strong “n=1” vibe. Perhaps what I notice is that it’s not really a review where you explored the options and make a recommendation, but more of a log entry of what you did (“I’ve set it to X”) and how it made you feel (“«I want» them to yield at least 10%, because «I want» to be paid for the risk «I» take, and «I want» them to have a buyback guarantee.” could have been written as “They should yield at least 10% because of the risk involved, despite the buyback guarantee, which is still a risk despite the buyback guarantee because X” [I honestly didn’t quite get what risk you are taking here]).
That said, the article was useful to me. I just saw Gnòtul’s comment and it resonated with me, so I wanted to help make the blog better by giving feedback on what I noticed. I’ll now go on to check out Mintos through the affiliate link, thanks! :)
I have invested a very small amount in Mintos to try out the platform. It’s already a year now and I am still in doubt to invest more in it. It is a young market and has not really proven it in economic downturn.
With regards to loans being late. It seems to come and go. Sometimes I have a lot of late loans and also periods where everything seems to be paid on time (give or take a few days).
Mintos is really the way to go!
It is also very nice that you can have the same kind of profits even when you invest only to short term loans. That way you have more flexibility, and In my opinion, less risk. I will also adopt that strategy to my new Mintos and Grupeer loans.
– Financial Nordic
Hi there, once again: nice blog – if I may, please keep the “quality” and don’t be tempted to go down the “quantity” road.
Just my two cents based on personal experience: Invest&Access also has late loans, and the money tied up in them is not accessible (at least that was the case for me when I tested and I still have some small amounts I’m not able to cash out). If your main concern is unproductiveness of your invested principal, I would suggest setting up in Autoinvest only loan originators who pay interest also on late loans.
Hi there Gnòtul! Thanks for stopping by. You’re absolutely right about the Invest & Access not being able to sell late loans. However, I see that the amount that is late versus my own strategy is way lower.
Could you please explain your comment on quality versus quantity?
About the Invest&Access, I got it. I didn’t stay too long in Invest&Access to make a real study, I guess I’m just happy with Autoinvest and being paid even if the loans are late.
Don’t take too seriously my comment about quantity vs quality: what I meant is that some bloggers almost seem like they force themselves to post a certain number of articles per week, hence after a while inevitably the content gets a bit “meh”.
Cheers!
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