Jean Galea

Mintos is a peer-to-peer lending platform in Europe. Like many other fintech companies of this type, it is based in the Baltic region, in Latvia specifically. However, they do have other offices in Mexico and Poland.

Mintos started operating in 2015, but has experienced rapid growth due to getting a lot of things right and becoming popular with financial bloggers due to its ease of use and transparency.

Although it’s still early days for P2P lending in general and Mintos as a platform, they have some incredible numbers to be proud of.

The average net annual return for investors is 12.06% as of June 2019, with more than 150,000 investors registered from all over the world, an average investment of €4,925 and more €47,000,000 in interest paid to investors.

Another important statistic to look at is the loanbook growth, and here again Mintos is doing very well as can be seen in the following screenshot.

The total money invested so far is higher than 2.2 billion Euros, which is a staggering number for such a young platform. There is no doubt that Mintos is the biggest player in P2P lending in Europe at the moment. There are some good competitors, but none of them provide the security and track record that Mintos does.

All their employees (60+ as of June 2019) are listed on their website and this is a nice touch that enhances the feeling of transparency and peace of mind. I am one of those who take a look at these pages on a website and use them when judging whether I should invest on a platform or not. Everything counts.

Mintos is a platform that is in line with EU law, so when you invest you won’t have any trouble with your accountant or tax authorities back home in terms of explaining what you are doing.

Finally and very importantly, Mintos as a company is profitable, so they are not only running on investor money but are actually turning a profit, which means that they have a much higher chance of standing the test of time compared to some other competitors that are still in startup mode.

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These are my annualized latest rates of returns on the various peer-to-peer landing platforms that I’m invested in:

• Mintos – 11.42%
• Viventor – 15.51%
• Bulkestate – 12.4%
• October – 7.12%
• Reinvest24 – 8.01%
• iFunded – 5%

I’ll be adding others once I finish calculating the returns on them as I still have some more to go through. Hopefully, this will serve to give you an idea of the kinds of returns you can make with this alternative investment class.

I also invest in other platforms where the rate of return is harder to calculate as the investments are not all loans. For example with Housers and Property Partner, many of the projects are buy-to-sell projects or development projects whose rate of return will only be known once they are completed and sold on the market.

When calculating returns, keep in mind that you will most probably have to pay tax on those P2P lending returns in your country of residence.

As this is a risky asset class, I would recommend investing an amount of money that would not cripple your life if it were to eventually get lost due to the various risks of P2P lending. If your risk tolerance is higher and have several income streams as I do, then you can invest a bit more.

If you’re thinking of investing in P2P as an overall investment strategy, you can check how P2P compares to other investments on my other post about that topic. You can also read about what I think are the best peer-to-peer loan platforms in Europe as of this year.

I’ve already written extensively about my P2P lending experience and my favorite P2P lending platforms, but today we’ll take a look at something slightly different: P2P lending platforms that specialize in crypto backed loans.

Let’s take a look at the best platforms available.

Coinloan

CoinLoan is a P2P lending platform for cryptoassets backed loans, based in Estonia.

Here’s how it works.

As a lender you first deposit fiat funds or stablecoins. The borrower, on the other hand, deposits cryptoassets to secure a loan.

Once the lender and the borrower are matched, a smart contract is used to ensure the borrower pays on time, else he would risk his crypto collateral.

Once the loan is paid off, the lender gets his principal returned plus interests, while the crypto assets are returned to the borrower.

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