Mintos

Mintos is Europe's largest loan marketplace: more than 500,000 investors put money into loans from many lending companies through the platform, over €12.7bn cumulatively. p2p-investments.de rates Mintos A (8.0/10) with good data coverage. The strengths are real — a full investment firm licence, KPMG-audited accounts and some of the most transparent statistics on the market. The price for that is credit risk: the loans are mostly unsecured, and the buyback obligation is not carried by Mintos. How we arrive at this grade is set out in our rating methodology.

What does Mintos offer investors?

Instead of backing a single lender, on Mintos you spread capital across many lending companies, countries and loan types — from consumer loans through car and business loans to real estate. You invest in securitised Notes (securities with an ISIN); the minimum is €50. There is no fee for investing, while the secondary market costs 0.85%. Alongside classic auto-invest there are ready-made portfolios (Core Loans, High-Yield, Conservative) and a money-market option called Smart Cash.

Unlike many competitors, Mintos publishes the net annual return investors actually realised: around 11.4% in 2025 and 11.3% in 2023, but only 7.8% in the crisis year 2022. That openness is rare — and one reason Mintos ranks among the best-documented providers in our platform comparison.

How we rate Mintos

We score five criteria with fixed weights. The breakdown above summarises the points; here is the reasoning with evidence (as of June 2026).

Safety & regulation (8.0/10). The operator, AS Mintos Marketplace, holds a MiFID II investment firm licence (no. 06.06.08.719/534, since August 2021) that is verifiable in the Latvijas Banka register. Investments are structured as securitised Notes, investor funds are held separately from the platform's own assets, and the investor compensation scheme covers up to €20,000 — but only against platform failure, not loan defaults. That is exactly where the weakness lies: the buyback obligation only triggers after 60 days past due and is carried by the lending company, not Mintos; the loans themselves are mostly unsecured. To its credit, Mintos requires lenders to keep skin in the game and scores each company quarterly via its Risk Score.

Transparency (8.5/10). Here Mintos is exemplary. The 2024 consolidated accounts carry an unqualified KPMG audit opinion (IFRS, revenue €12.4M), the owners are disclosed (founders Martins Sulte and Martins Valters, anchor shareholder Aigars Kesenfelds, plus thousands of crowd investors), and the fee schedule is fully public. The portfolio statistics are particularly strong: a Mintos Risk Score per lending company, updated quarterly. We deduct only because the audited figures sit at holding level rather than for the individual investment firm.

Track record & stability (7.0/10). Mintos has been handling investor money since 2015 and weathered two major geopolitical crises transparently — Covid in 2020 and the Russia/Ukraine crisis in 2022, both external shocks rather than platform-caused failures. Withdrawals continued throughout, recovery figures were published proactively, and AMAs were held. Assets under management are growing (€673M at the end of 2024). On the negative side: around €130M in unresolved originator defaults from those crises, and fluctuating profitability — a €2.74M consolidated loss in 2024 from heavy growth investment.

Returns & terms (8.0/10). Net returns of around 10–11% are appropriate for the risk and achievable through broad diversification; the fact that Mintos publishes the realised figures at all counts in its favour. We deduct for the 0.85% secondary-market fee, currency and inactivity fees, and the clear dip in crisis years (7.8% in 2022). More on this in our knowledge article on the returns and risks of P2P loans.

Investor-friendliness & liquidity (8.5/10). A low entry point (€50), a German-language interface, mature auto-invest and ready-made portfolios, plus a working secondary market make Mintos very usable. Two small drawbacks: secondary -market liquidity is not guaranteed, and the tax report is not tailored specifically to the German Anlage KAP.

Data coverage and open questions

Our grade rests on 22 of 25 evidence questions answered from solid sources — data coverage: good. Despite the high transparency, real risks remain, and we name them plainly: the loans are mostly unsecured, and the buyback obligation is carried by the lending company, not Mintos. That this protection can fail is not theory — several originators (including Finko, Capital Service, ExpressCredit and Russian lenders) defaulted on it; industry-wide some €130M is still considered unresolved. There is no supervisory action against Mintos itself, and the audited figures are only available at group level.

Who Mintos is for

Mintos is the obvious first stop in P2P — the base platform that almost no one entering the space gets around: many lenders, many countries, a working secondary market and transparency that is hard to match in this market. If you want to use P2P deliberately as a small, broadly diversified add-on, you'll find one of the more solid addresses in the industry — provided you spread capital across enough lending companies and accept the default risk of unsecured consumer loans. P2P remains a risk investment: as everywhere in this market, invest only money whose temporary loss you can absorb, and spread across several platforms. The basics are covered in our knowledge article on P2P lending fundamentals.