Mintos Review 2026: Strong Regulation, Real Credit Risk

Mintos is an online investment platform run by AS Mintos Marketplace, a licensed investment firm in Riga, Latvia. It started as a marketplace for loans issued by non-bank lenders and is still mainly known for that, but in 2026 it also sells ETFs, fractional bonds, rental real estate, crypto ETPs and a money market product called Smart Cash. Mintos says it has more than 700,000 registered users and over €800 million under management; its 2025 annual report gives 664,000 registered users and €795 million at year-end.

This review concentrates on the loan products, because that is what most people mean when they search for Mintos and where most of the risk sits. The short version: Mintos is a regulated intermediary selling you notes whose value depends on third-party lending companies in markets such as the Baltics, Central Asia and Latin America. The regulation is real and useful. It does not make the loans any less risky.

For how we weigh licences, track record and liquidity into one number, see our methodology; the platform profile with the live figures is at Mintos.

A lending company — Mintos calls them lending companies, the industry calls them loan originators — issues loans to borrowers in its home market. Instead of selling you those loans directly, a special-purpose entity inside the Mintos group issues Notes: regulated financial instruments whose payments track a pool of underlying loans.

What you actually own

Each Set of Notes pools 6–20 similar loans, and your repayments follow the repayments on that pool. A Note has a nominal value of €0.01, and the primary-market minimum is €50 per Set. You own a financial instrument issued by a Mintos entity, not the loan agreement itself and not a claim on Mintos' balance sheet.

Where the money comes from

Borrowers repay the lending company, the lending company passes the money to the issuer, and the issuer pays you. If any link in that chain breaks — most often the lending company — your payments stop until the problem is resolved. Mintos' own risk page states it plainly: if a lending company fails, investors "might not be able to receive payments".

If a lending company goes out of business, the issuer can appoint a backup servicer to keep collecting from borrowers, and some loan receivables are pledged to the issuer. Mintos also warns that recoveries can be insufficient and may require lengthy court proceedings with uncertain results.

The platform is operated by AS Mintos Marketplace (registration number 40103903643, LEI 213800CDJOF7ZZVSKW68), with paid-up share capital of €8.5 million. Its parent is Mintos AS, which was called Mintos Holdings AS until 7 April 2026.

The chairman of the management board of both companies is Martins Sulte, Mintos' co-founder and chief executive. The other management board member named in the group's 2025 report is Martins Valters. The operating company's board also includes Karlis Kronbergs, Inese Lazdovska and Marcis Gogis.

The group employed 179 people at the end of 2025. Its accounts have been audited by KPMG Baltics since 2020, and earlier by Ernst & Young Baltic. That is a longer audited history than most platforms in this market can show, and it matters: you can read what the company earns, what it loses and how much capital it holds rather than taking it on trust.

Mintos accepts EU/EEA and Swiss citizens and residents aged 18 or over. Applications from other countries are assessed individually. US nationals and residents, and UK residents, cannot register.

1. 1Register with your email address and create a password.
2. 2Verify your identity with an ID document and, if asked, proof of residence.
3. 3Enter your tax details — country of tax residence and tax identification number. This determines the withholding tax rate on note interest (see the tax section).
4. 4Link a bank account in your own name and make a first deposit. The minimum for card and open-banking deposits is €50.
5. 5Choose how to invest: Core Loans, a Custom Loans portfolio, manual selection, or one of the non-loan products.

Mintos lists a €50 one-off, non-refundable fee for registrations that need enhanced compliance checks. Most standard applications should not trigger it, but it exists.

Before you deposit, read the risk section below and decide how much you are prepared to leave exposed to non-bank lenders for a year or more.

Mintos is straightforward to join and, once funded, can run with very little input: the ready-made loan portfolio needs only a target amount.

Signing up Identity checks are handled in the browser or on your phone by Veriff. You photograph the front and back of your ID card, or your passport's photo page, and take a selfie; an optional NFC step reads the document's chip. Mintos says verification is "in most cases" completed automatically within a few minutes, and it emails you when it is done.

Setting up investing - Core Loans: set how much you want to invest and Mintos does the rest, including reinvesting repayments and capping any one lending company at 15%. - Custom Loans: for people who want control, with more than 20 filters. - Manual: pick individual Notes yourself.

App and dashboard The Mintos app runs on iOS and Android. It shows invested and available balances, returns and interest rates, lets you add or withdraw money, and supports fingerprint or Face ID login with optional two-factor authentication. On 22 September 2026 the Google Play listing showed 3.5 stars from 1,820 reviews. The platform, app and support are available in ten languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Russian and Spanish.

Documents and support An annual tax report is downloadable under Reports in your profile. Support starts with the Mintos Assistant, an AI chat available around the clock in the help centre and your account, which passes questions it cannot answer to a human agent; Mintos aims to reply within five business days. You can also request a phone callback through the chat, handled during business hours.

There are four ways to add money:

• Manual bank transfer — no Mintos fee and no limit. Works from services such as Wise and Revolut.
• Easy Bank Transfer — an open-banking payment for EUR, €50 minimum, no Mintos fee. Not available in the Baltic countries at the time of writing.
• Payment card — Visa or Mastercard in your own name, €50 minimum, 2% fee.
• Apple Pay and Google Pay — in the mobile app only, €50 to €1,000 per transaction and €1,000 per month, 2% fee.

The 2% card fee is worth avoiding: on a 10% yield it costs more than two months of interest. A bank transfer does the same job for free.

Withdrawals are free. Mintos says euro withdrawals to a bank that supports SEPA Instant usually arrive in about 30 minutes, and others take 1–2 business days. You can only withdraw a currency to a bank account linked to that currency.

Only uninvested cash can be withdrawn this way. Money inside loans must first be sold or repaid — see the liquidity section.

Loans

• Core Loans is the ready-made portfolio. It replaced the older Mintos Core and Diversified portfolios in December 2022 and spreads money across lending companies on the primary and secondary markets. It is the simplest option and charges 0.39% a year.
• Custom Loans lets you set your own criteria — Mintos lists more than 20 filters, including lending company, country, risk score and term — and invests automatically. It charges 0.29% a year.
• Manual investing means choosing Notes yourself. There is no management fee.

Investors who joined before December 2022 may still have the discontinued High Yield or Conservative portfolios, which now carry the same 0.39% fee as Core Loans.

Other products

• Bonds: fractional high-yield corporate bonds from €50, including an automated High-Yield Bonds portfolio launched in November 2025 (0.39% a year; manual bonds are free).
• ETFs: more than 1,000 ETFs from €1, with no buy, sell or custody fee.
• Real estate: fractional rental property from €50 with no purchase fee.
• Smart Cash: a euro money market fund (BlackRock ICS Euro Liquidity Fund) from €1, advertised at up to 2.5% and charging 0.19% a year.
• Crypto ETPs: 0.49% per transaction, minimum €0.99.

These products carry different risks from loan notes, and we have not assessed them in this review. Our score for Mintos is driven by the loan business.

Mintos quotes two headline numbers, and they are not the same thing. The statistics page shows a current average interest rate of 10.27% across loans on the platform. The homepage shows 9.2%, described as a weighted average of loans currently available to invest in. Both are gross interest rates on performing loans. Neither is what an investor actually earned.

The number that matters is Mintos' own historical net return — gross return minus the annual loss rate:

• 2019: 11.0%
• 2020: 4.3% (losses of 6.3 points)
• 2021: 6.1% (losses of 3.6 points)
• 2022: −1.2% (losses of 8.2 points, much of it from the Russia–Ukraine war)
• 2023: 10.4%
• 2024: 9.3%

No 2025 figure was published on that page when we checked. The pattern is the useful part: in good years the net return is close to the headline rate; in bad years it has fallen by six to eleven points. Losses arrive in clusters, when several lending companies fail together, not as a smooth annual cost.

Three further things reduce what you receive: the 0.39% or 0.29% portfolio fee, withholding tax on interest, and cash drag — money waiting in your account between repayments and new investments earns nothing unless you route it to Smart Cash. A high rate on a loan is a price for risk, not a promise of income; our risks page explains why.

Mintos is not free to use any more. The fees that apply to a typical loan investor:

• Core Loans and legacy portfolios: 0.39% a year, calculated on the daily portfolio balance and charged monthly.
• Custom Loans: 0.29% a year (from 16 May 2025).
• Manual loan investing: no management fee.
• Secondary market: 0.85% of the amount sold. Buying is free.
• Currency exchange: from 0.50%, depending on the currency pair.
• Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay deposits: 2%.
• Bank transfer deposits and all withdrawals: free.
• Inactivity: €4.90 a month, charged if for 360 days there have been no investments, sales, deposits or withdrawals and the account holds no ETFs, bonds, real estate, crypto ETPs or Smart Cash. There is no minimum balance threshold, so a forgotten account can be emptied over time.
• Recovery costs: deducted from recovered amounts, never more than the amount recovered.

The annual fee is small next to a 10% coupon, but it is charged whether or not the loans perform. In a year like 2022, it adds to a loss rather than trimming a gain.

For how these fees compare with the other licensed platforms we rate highest, see our P2P lending fees comparison.

Loan notes run to maturity. You can leave early in two ways:

1. 1Cash out from Core Loans or a legacy portfolio. Mintos sells your holdings to other investors in the same portfolio with no fee. It says this takes "from minutes up to a few days, depending on demand from other investors".
2. 2Sell on the secondary market — list Notes at par, a discount or a premium, pay the 0.85% fee, and receive the money when someone buys.

Mintos reports €468 million of loans sold on its secondary market in total and says 84% of investors have used it. In normal conditions, that makes exiting performing loans realistic within days.

The catch is that liquidity disappears exactly when you want it most. Notes from lending companies that are suspended or defaulted cannot be traded, and notes in pending payments or overdue status are not eligible either. If a lending company fails, the part of your portfolio exposed to it is locked until recovery finishes — in the 2020 cases, that has meant years. Treat money in Mintos loans as tied up, not as a savings account.

Most loans on Mintos carry a buyback obligation: if an underlying loan is more than 60 days late, the lending company must buy it back with accrued interest. In ordinary times this makes returns look smooth, because individual borrower defaults are absorbed by the lending company.

The buyback is only as strong as the company giving it. It is not a guarantee from Mintos, a bank or any government. Mintos itself says so: "the buyback obligation is only as good as the company undertaking this obligation. If the buyback provider fails to honor its obligation, the investor is directly exposed to the risk of the borrower not making repayments."

That means the risk you are really taking is the credit risk of each lending company — often a small, high-cost consumer lender in a market with volatile regulation and currency. When one fails, the buyback fails with it. The Nera Capital case in 2026 shows the mechanism: the 60-day buyback was triggered, the delayed amounts moved to "Pending Payments" and started accruing interest, but Mintos stated that actual repayment depends on when the lending company receives recoveries.

Mintos publishes a Risk Score for each lending company, with subscores for buyback strength, servicer efficiency and cooperation structure. Use them, but remember that the lenders that failed in 2020 and 2026 all had scores when investors bought their notes. Spreading money across many unrelated lending companies does more than choosing a high score.

AS Mintos Marketplace holds a MiFID investment firm licence, No. 06.06.08.719/534, dated 17 August 2021 and updated on 28 November 2024. It is supervised by Latvijas Banka, the central bank of Latvia, which took over financial supervision from the former Financial and Capital Market Commission. The licence covers reception and transmission of orders, execution, dealing on own account, portfolio management, investment advice and placement of financial instruments. Mintos' help centre states that no Mintos company holds a crowdfunding service provider licence.

What the licence gives you

• Your cash and financial instruments must be held separately from Mintos' own assets, in safeguarding accounts at EU-licensed banks and qualifying money market funds.
• The Notes are issued under a base prospectus, with final terms for each issue.
• Mintos is subject to capital requirements and publishes disclosures under Regulation (EU) 2019/2033.

What the investor compensation scheme covers

Mintos is a member of the Latvian investor compensation scheme under Directive 97/9/EC. If Mintos itself fails and cannot return your cash or financial instruments, retail investors can claim up to €20,000. The scheme does not cover:

• the default of a borrower, lending company or issuer;
• a fall in the price of an investment;
• the lack of a buyer when you want to sell.

In other words, it protects you against Mintos losing your assets, not against the loans going bad — which is how Mintos investors have actually lost money. Mintos is not a bank, and nothing held there is a bank deposit or covered by any deposit guarantee scheme.

Mintos publishes audited accounts for both the operating company and the group. The 2025 figures:

• Group (Mintos AS): total income €14.47 million (2024: €12.43 million); loss for the year €2.28 million (2024: loss of €2.74 million).
• AS Mintos Marketplace: total income €14.13 million (2024: €12.09 million); loss of €1.98 million (2024: €2.09 million).

Income is growing and the loss is narrowing, but the business has not been profitable in either of the last two years. The group's 2025 report states that the going-concern basis remains appropriate and that Mintos planned to raise additional capital in the first half of 2026. We could not confirm whether that raise completed.

Why this matters to a loan investor: your cash and Notes are segregated, so a Mintos insolvency should not swallow them. But Mintos also runs recoveries, chases failed lenders and services the issuing structures. A platform under financial pressure has fewer resources for that work.

On track record, Mintos has operated since 2015, has published loss data for every year, and did not hide the 2020–2022 losses. That openness is the main reason it scores highly on our methodology. It is not the same as having avoided losses.

2020–2022

In 2020, several lending companies on Mintos stopped paying investors and were suspended or declared in default. Russian and Ukrainian exposure caused further losses in 2022. Mintos' historical figures show loss rates of 6.3% in 2020, 3.6% in 2021 and 8.2% in 2022. Recoveries from some of these companies are still in progress and are reported to investors on an Overdue page in their account; we could not find a current aggregate recovery figure on Mintos' public pages.

2026: Nera Capital

Nera Notes are backed by loans to UK law firms that fund consumer legal claims. The lending company is Nera Capital Funding 2 DAC, and Nera Capital Ltd acts as servicer. According to Mintos' updates:

• interest payments have been delayed since April 2026, after UK law firm borrowers stopped scheduled payments;
• the Solicitors Regulation Authority is reviewing around 80 law firms' solvency, which Mintos said it could not independently verify;
• the principal repayment due on 20 May 2026 had not been received by 2 June 2026;
• by 15 June 2026, a restructuring term sheet was in "final stages" of negotiation.

Mintos wrote that principal repayment at maturity "cannot be guaranteed in the current circumstances and most likely will be delayed". It also acknowledged that some delayed payments had been displayed as "Paid" by mistake.

2026: Fintech Finance and Biznes Zaim

Mintos reports that these two lending companies have been removed from the platform and are moving towards a voluntary wind-down with gradual repayment over an expected 18–24 months. As of the 15 June 2026 update, the most recent payment was €250,000, which Mintos said did not yet cover the full settlement amounts.

Before investing, check the "Overdue – ongoing cases" figures on Mintos' statistics page and the status of each lending company you are buying.

1. 1Lending company failure. The biggest risk, and the one that has actually cost Mintos investors money. The buyback disappears with the lender.
2. 2Concentration in stress. Failures cluster. In 2020, 2022 and 2026, several lenders ran into trouble at once, so diversification across lenders helps but does not remove the risk.
3. 3Liquidity freeze. Notes of suspended or defaulted lenders cannot be sold, so the affected money is stuck until recovery ends.
4. 4Structural and legal risk. Recovery can involve court proceedings in the lender's country, clawback claims and costs that are paid before investors.
5. 5Platform risk. Mintos is loss-making. Segregation and the €20,000 compensation scheme limit, but do not remove, the damage a platform failure could do.
6. 6Currency and country risk. Many borrowers repay in local currencies in emerging markets, and local rate caps or regulation can change quickly.
7. 7Fee and cash drag. Annual fees, the 0.85% sale fee and idle cash reduce the realised return below the advertised rate.

These are not bank deposits. Invest only money you can leave in place through a bad year. If you want to compare how other platforms handle the same risks, try Mintos vs PeerBerry or Mintos vs Twino.

This is general information, not tax advice. How Mintos income is taxed depends on your country of tax residence, and the rules change.

Mintos withholds Latvian tax on interest from Notes and Fractional Bonds paid to private investors (not to legal entities):

• EU/EEA tax residents (except Latvia and Lithuania) can reduce the rate to 5% by entering their tax identification number and confirming they invest as a private person. No certificate is needed.
• Latvian tax residents: 25.5%.
• Lithuanian tax residents: 0% with a confirmation statement from the Lithuanian tax office.
• Everyone else: 25.5% by default, reducible under a tax treaty with a valid tax residence certificate.

In most countries you still declare the interest at home, and you may be able to credit the Latvian tax withheld against your domestic liability. Mintos provides an annual tax report in the account — the 2025 report was expected by the end of March 2026 — and it reports account balances and gross income to the Latvian State Revenue Service under the OECD Common Reporting Standard, which passes it to your home tax authority.

Losses from defaulted loans, fees and currency effects are treated differently from country to country. Speak to a tax adviser in your country of residence before you file.