Mintos review
9
(our review)
Mintos is an online investment platform. Our editorial staff is positive about it: in our review we rated it a 9 out of 10. The platform offers a fairly stable and high return on loans. It is also easy to use. For this review, we created two accounts and invested in several loans and ETFs.
Content:
Please note: investing online on Mintos comes with risks, you may lose (part of) your deposit.
What characterizes Mintos?
Over half a million of people save or invest money on Mintos. It is a Latvian company, which was founded as a peer-to-peer platform. After that, it quickly became a market leader in Europe.
It now also offers bonds, real estate and ETFs. It aims to grow as a platform for long-term investing. It already complies with strict MiFiD regulations.
In 2023, retail investors invested almost 1.2 billion euros on Mintos. And 954 million euros of that total were invested through automated loan portfolios. On average, investors earned a net return of 11.26 percent on loan investments in that year. A year earlier, their average net return was 7.8 percent.
Creating an account
Creating an account on Mintos is pretty easy. The platform and app interface are available in Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Russian and Spanish. Because of that, the registration procedure is very accessible to most European users.
When you create an account, the platform asks for a picture of your passport or an ID to verify your identity. After verifying your email address, your social security number and your passport data, you will need to answer some questions that platforms are obligated to ask because of regulations.
After that, your account is created and you can start depositing money into the account. In that step, it becomes clear how localized Mintos is. It shows you the logos of local banks and payment methods. This makes transferring money to the platform very easy, wherever you are.
Usability Mintos
The fact that you can set the platform and app to your local language makes it very easy to use. It comes across as very reliable. Although, it can take some getting used to if you are new to investing in general.
It is possible to automate your investment with Mintos’ automated investing feature. Four out five investors use this feature. If you want to, you can also make your own decisions. Always be sure to compare investment options. If you want to invest in loans, you will get an overview with thousands of loans as shown in the following image:
It is pretty difficult to know which loans to select. Of course, sometimes can go wrong. Always spread your investment. It can take a lot of time to do that manually. You can also get lost in the platform’s many options.
But the most common solution, automated investing, is easy to use. You can set up your profile, indicate how much risk you want to take and then let the platform do its work. And if you transfer money automatically via a monthly transfer, you hardly have to think about your investments anymore.
Automated investing feature
Novice investors are usually better off with one of the automated investing features at Mintos. The platform used to offer several ‘strategies’, where your funds would be automatically spread across a diversified portfolio.
However, as of December 2022, the platform now only offers an automated investing solution called Core Loans. This portfolio diversifies your investment across all loans with a Mintos Risk Score of 10.0 to 3.5 with a buyback obligation.
By using this strategy, users automatically spread their investment, with a limited exposure per company. If you want, it is possible to withdraw the funds that you invested with this strategy. This entails selling the loans you invested in to other investors with the same portfolio.
Investments in different currencies
It is possible to invest in loans that come with other currencies than euros. To do that, you will need to exchange your money into that currency. Mintos charges an exchange fee.
This fee might make investing in a different currency seem less attractive, but interest rates on these loans can run as high as eighteen percent. Please note that high interest rates are usually associated with higher risks. Just like on other platforms, losing your investment is possible at Mintos.
However, Mintos does offer the option of investing with a buyback guarantee. The provider of this loan – identified by a gold shield – then guarantees the loan. When the loan is repaid sixty days late, the provider repurchases the loan.
Investing on Mintos is possible with a minimum of 10 euros. The company serves over 30 markets and currencies, which makes it easier to diversify your investment portfolio. It also offers a secondary market.
Customer service
If you want to contact customer service, you can send an email, chat or request a callback. Like most fintechs, Mintos tries to limit customer service. In the contact form, it already provides instant answers as soon as you enter a question, and in the chat it starts out with a chatbot.
When we requested a callback, it took a couple of hours until we received a call. One time, we got a callback the next day. The customer service calls you from a +371 phone number. Additionally, the customer service agent does not speak all languages of the markets where Mintos is active. However, we were pleasantly and friendly helped in English.
Good chatbot and usage of FAQ
Due to the delay of callback requests, we are more positive about the chat function. You are not obligated to write in English. You can write in your own language, although it is not optimal. It sometimes has trouble with translations and asks for a review in English at the end. If you are contacting the platform by email, the ticket email is in English.
Apart from that, our experience of Mintos’ customer service is quite positive. The platform makes a real effort to help its investors. The pre-programmed questions also go beyond the standard options, but seem to come from a database of questions once asked by over half a million users. As a result, these actually solved all of our test questions, requiring us to make an effort to actually come up with another question.
Product offer
It started out as a p2p-platform, but Mintos has since then shifted its strategy to more general long-term investing. Bonds and ETFs were added in 2023. In 2024, the platform also added real estate as an investment option.
P2P-loans still make up the biggest share of all investment options. Yet, as an investor it feels more like investing in a large and diversified fund. If you want to invest in riskier options, and invest mainly in loans with high interest rates for example, that is possible. You can change the platform’s settings to your own preferences. You can filter options based on maturities of loans, financiers, countries or types of loans.
This means that investing in loans remains the platform’s core business. It is a market leader in Europe: Mintos is 5 times larger than its closest competitors in terms of assets under management. But new products like bonds, real estate and ETFs are a strong addition for users who can invest bigger amounts, or for those who want to use the platform for extra diversification.
User experiences
You can read about predominantly enthusiastic experiences with Mintos on various forums, comparison sites and review pages. It also won AltFi People’s Choice Award five years in a row. This is one of the most prestigious awards in the industry, in 2020 Mintos won based on nearly four thousand votes.
Pricing
Most fees of the platform are paid for by borrowers. There are no fees for opening an account, depositing or withdrawing money. Investor fees are calculated into the returns. Like exchanging different currencies and selling on the secondary market.
In addition, Mintos charges fees after 6 months of inactivity for holding uninvested funds. It also retains a portion as recovery costs in the event of successful recovery of full or partial payments from lending companies.
Reliability and risks
Founded in 2014, Mintos has been around for more than a decade. In those years, it has become a leader within the market of p2p-platforms. Furthermore, it is an authorized investment firm under MiFID II. These are European regulations that provide additional protection and transparency for investors.
In 2022 and 2023, Mintos was profitable and it has won multiple awards including AltFi’s People’s Choice Award and AltFi’s Alternative Finance Platform of the Year. These are some of the most prestigious awards in this category.
Though you can think of Mintos as a startup with big growth plans that are still going to cost a lot of money, which carries risks. In early 2024, it launched another crowdfunding campaign of its own through Crowdcube to fund its planned growth. Nevertheless, we do see Mintos as a reliable and safe platform.
High-risk investments
The product itself, investing in unsecured loans from individuals around the world, can be seen as very risky. Because you cannot tell if you are investing in a politically unstable region or an area that has a lot of natural disasters, you cannot assess the consequences of financing a relatively large number of loans here.
The automated investment tool partially takes this into account, but also had a negative result itself in 2022 when the platform needed to wind down its Russian loans. So the impact of these types of world influences is certainly present on this platform.
For this review, we looked at the 740 loans it selected and among them were loans from individuals in South Africa, Moldova, Albania and Kenya with interest rates as high as 15.4 percent. This portfolio has been running for several years, possibly giving a fair idea of the current situation. In it, 683 loans are now running on schedule; the remaining 57 are in default at the time of writing. Despite this, we are still making excellent returns on the entire portfolio.
Criticisms of returns
Often, borrowers do not make their repayments (on time) and these delays are sometimes not calculated into the returns. Another drawback that often comes up in reviews is that a transfer to your Mintos account takes one or more business days. Because of that, you cannot invest in something immediately.
Furthermore, some users have criticized the platform’s buyback guarantee. The guarantee is facilitated through affiliated partners of Mintos, not by the platform itself. If these lenders get into financial trouble, or stop paying, you still run the risk of losing your deposit in all loans from them.
Review score: 9
In our latest review, we rated Mintos a 9 out of 10. This makes it one of our preferred platforms. Investors who are looking for more returns than what saving can offer you, Mintos’s relatively stable interest is a nice solution. Investors also do not have to deal with the big price swings that come with stocks or options.
With returns that can reach above ten percent, Mintos is pretty interestin compared to other forms of investment. However, it is also relatively risky. With its automated investing feature, you will quickly invest in hundreds of loans that have high risks.
Advantages of Mintos are that it is very easy to set up and transfer money. Although, of course, in that convenience lies the downside. You no longer see what you are investing in. That also makes it possible that you misjudge the risks of your investments.