Mintos Review: how you can get a 11.38% return

Last updated 02-02-2020

Mintos is my favorite peer to peer investing platform. It is the platform I will recommend to friends if they want to start in peer to peer. The transparency and many options of the platform make it a good place to invest both for high and for low risk seekers. Those many options are important. As a new user you might want to invest your money as fast as possible and don’t pay attention to what is important. Read my review and find out how you can get a 11.38% return relatively safe.

If you are a more advanced reader and are already familair with Mintos then scroll further down to find out what 30 Loan Originators I chose in my auto-invest.

What is Mintos exactly?

Mintos is a Fintech company where you can invest in loans. This system is called peer to peer lending. Basically Mintos is a mediator between Credit companies who provide credit to individuals. As an investor you invest in those loans and get a certain return.

The credit company or (also known as Loan Originators) provides you with a lower interest rate then they are providing to the individuals. In exchange they provide insurance under the name of buy back guarantee. That means if a loan defaults they will buy back the loan. Be aware that not all Loan originators offer buy back, so its important to check this before investing.

Because you can invest already from a small amount (10 EUR on primary market), that means that if you invest 500 EUR it is spread over 50 loans and different creditors.

Its important to note two things that give additional confidence in Mintos: Mintos is profitable, and Mintos is the biggest peer to peer site outthere.

Registration

On the site just click the “Create an account” button to go trough the wizard for Registration. Have your passport ready before you start and you need to use a device with a camera such as a smartphone or laptop, you will need them at the ID verification screen.

Mintos will take you trough a very simple wizard to get you registered.

Once registered the very first thing you should do is verify your account. This is general advise for all platforms you plan to use. Click the Verify button in order to do so.

Then Mintos can start taking photos of you and your ID card to make sure your identity is verified.

Overview

Once you finished the registration process take your time to get familiar with Mintos. I personally think the Mintos overview screen is one of the best.

The account balance shows how much funds are in your account right now. How much is available (to invest), how much you currently have invested, and lastly pending payments, these are payments that borrowers did to the Loan Originators and are going to be transferred to your account within the next 5 days.

The Net Annual Return part shows your annual return. I have quite a conservative investment strategy on Mintos and I am happy to see that the return Mintos has calculated is a good match with the return I calculated myself (11.38%).

The last screen shows my investments. As you can see about 2/3 of the payments are late somehow. This is normal on Mintos and is nothing to be concerned about. When the loan is overdue for over 60 days then the Loan Originator will buy back the loan, plus interests (if you selected the right Loan Originator in the auto-invest module).

If you click on current it gives you a great overview of all the loans in your portfolio. It then automatically filters on current, I just unselect current by clicking the X to see all my investments:

This gives a beautiful overview of all the investments you have,their term and their status. As you can see I do not have optimal diversification as I’m very exposed to Capital Service. This was because when I first started investing I went more for high returns rather then diversification. However this is something that will get solved in time.

At the left screen you also have a lot of filters you can select should you wish to know about anything in particular.

Depositing money

Before you can invest you will need to deposit money. I usually use bank transfer. In this case it will take about two days to reach your account. That’s fine, you can use this time to get used to Mintos and set up your auto-invests. If you can’t wait you can use Direct transfer, this will go much faster.

Withdrawing money

I could only withdraw money to my own bank account, which is positive of course as it makes my money more secure.

Investing

Invest & Access

If you are interested in a lot of diversification and no hassle then you can use the invest & access option. I personally prefer to choose my investments myself but I know that this option has a large appeal to a lot of people

Auto-invest

Mintos has a great auto-invest tool, the only thing I am missing is a way to combine the primary and secondary market, forcing me to create two auto-invest rules. Other then that it allows all the options I can think of I would need.

Before setting up the auto-invest I want to mention the Loan Originators. Its crucial that you check up on these before you start investing. Here you can find a list that Mintos makes available.

When you click on one of the loan originators you will see for example its rating. This is a rating that Mintos themselves give to these Originators.

Also something to pay attention to is bellow in the details tab

There is two things important: penalty income and income on delayed payments. If not one of these is set to Yes, that means that if a loan is 60 days late you will just get the principal back and no interest. So not a very good investment. I personally would avoid investing in LO’s that do not provide either one of these.

For my auto-invest I have two rules, one of the primary and one for the secondary market.

I selected only Loan Originators of rating B and higher, that give interests or penalty’s on late payments. After selecting A, A-, B+ and B that meant I had to unselect Acema and EBV Finance.

I also unselected Finko as this is a group now but without a full group guarantee. ID Finance I kept but unselected B-. Last LO I did not select was Getbucks as I need to know more about their current financials before I decide to invest there. I do have some loans from most of these that I unselected and I just plan to keep them for now. Lutecredit I kept selected as I have faith in Lutecredit despite of the bad exposure with the Kosovo loans.

As rate I set a minimum of 10% to make sure I get both a decent interest rate, and a decent diversification. If you set it to high its very difficult to diversify.

Other important settings are portfolio size (set this a little higher then the amount you will invest), and minimum/maxumum in one loan. I set my maximum at 10 EUR to get as much loans as possible.

The secondary market

The differences with the secondary market is that you can already invest from a 1 EUR limit and that you can buy loans with a discount

Its really important to set the premium to 0% otherwise you will pay more then the loan is worth. You might think that you can recover that if its a high interest loan, but if the loan goes into default and you get a rebuy, you lose that premium you paid. You could consider placing it bellow 0% either, taking advantage of people who want to leave the market.

The secondary market is actually a huge advantage from Mintos as it allows you to sell your loans in case you need to leave. This is making your money more liquid although you can assume it will take 3-4 months to get all of your money out if you need to. But this is better then a lot of platforms that do not have a secondary markets or charge penalty’s for withdrawing money. Do not underestimate how powerful this feature is!

What have I been earning?

So far I must say that the earnings on Mintos have been very positive, reaching an interest rate of 11.38% and this fully diversified. It is only because I feel so safe on this platform and I have such a great return that I decided to write a Mintos Review. So far with 10.000 EUR Invested of my own money, and increasing monthly, I can say it has been a very good investment so far!

Security

Apart from that Mintos will only write back to your own bank account, Mintos has two factor authentication in place. Something I highly recommend you use. When you hover over your name you can click on “My Account” and there in security you can see how to set it up

Currency Exchange

Mintos has the option to invest using other currencies. Usually these loans give a higher interest rate, which is expected as you are exposing yourself to a currency risk.

I have not used it myself but its nice that they have this option.

Risks

Investing is not without Risk. Assuming you invest in your own currency then in the case of Mintos I see a few main risks:

• A loan you invested in could default. If you have bought all the loans with buy back guarantee, which you should, the risk is moving to the LO’s defaulting,
• You can invest using buy back guarantee but Loan Originators can go bankrupt. This has happened a few times with LO’s having low ratings. This is why I chose to invest only in LO’s with rating B and above. Additionally the auto invest will help you to diversify in case it does happen. Also you will still have your claim on the loan if it happens, this will not change. It will just become a lot harder to get your money back.
• Mintos could go bankrupt: I consider this as a small Risk. Mintos has over 100 employees so is a full grown company. It also released its yearly P/L and there it was shown to be a profitable company. In the case Mintos does go bankrupt your claim is still there on the loans.
• Liquidity Risk: the risk that you cannot get your money out in time when you need it. The secondary market mitigates this risk and I believe it should be possible to get your money out within 4 months.

I decided that the risks are worth the return, but everyone needs to decide for themselves and act with due diligence.

Transparency

Mintos releases a yearly report about its financials in April every year. You can view it here. The main thing is that Mintos had a 4.6M revenue in 2018, 59 Employees and 98k investors funded 1400M loans.

If you look on the Mintos homepage you can now see that there is 236k investors, more and 4300M loans funded. That shows to me the platform was not only healthy in 2018 but continues to be in 2019. All important factors for me to choose Mintos as one of my top investment platforms.

You can also see the full team of Mintos on their website and click trough a lot of Linkin profiles. Something I did with a few, and most are older profiles who have 500+ connections. Some are even a 3rd connection of me.

Also when there is bad news Mintos is open with communication. This was the case when a few of the LO’s lost their license to operate in Kosovo. Within a week we got news that both the Monegro and Lutecredit loans (the two LO’s that were affected) would be paid in full. Granted with a 5% exposure it was a long week, but even during that week Mintos was sharing news as it was coming in, making me feel like they were on the case.

Transparency is in general always a plus, and Mintos has shown to me it’s one of the most transparent platforms, not only about positive news but also about negative news. I can’t wait to see the financial statements of 2019!

Special referral deal: 90 days 1% bonus + 0.5% cashback!

Mintos has a referral program that gives a 1% bonus the first 30 days. However if you use my link then until end of March 2020 you will get he 1% bonus for 90 days and a 0.5% cashback! This is a one time unique offer that Mintos made for my readers.

I would like to stress that I would not affiliate myself with anything I do not support 100%, I have a lot of faith in Mintos and recommend you give it a spot in your portfolio. But if you do decide to take the step then I would appreciate it if you use my link as a way to support my blog.

Conclussion

In conclusion I am very happy about Mintos and will continue to expand my investments there. I would recommend this platform for anyone who wants to invest in peer to peer. I consider Mintos has the best platform Risk/Return ratio out-there.

Feature	Mintos
App	App is currently in Beta atm
Auto-invest option	Yes
Buyback guarantee	Yes
Fees?	No
General transparency	Very good
Invest in individual Loans	Yes
Invest in other currencies	Yes
Invest in projects (such as real estate)	No
Profitable	Yes
Released P&L	Yes
Risk compared to other p2p platforms	Low
Secondary Market	Yes
Staff is known	Yes
Transparrent about Loan Originators	Yes
Two factor authentication	Yes