6 Steps To Choose The Best Mintos Loan Originators [For 2024] (2024)

Wondering what the best Mintos loan originators are? Get ready to learn all the details about Mintos loan originators, how to review them, and which to avoid.

When you’re investing in Mintos, how do you select the loan originators offering loans through Mintos? Is a lower interest safer? Do I select loans with buyback guarantees only?

It may seem daunting to choose the right loan originators for you, out of the 65 loan originators that are on Mintos today.

It is not! I have been investing with Mintos for 1.5 years now, and I have selected loan originators that fit my needs exactly.

I have increased my annualized return with Mintos to 11.85% while investing in loans with a buyback guarantee and receiving interest on delayed loans.

Do you want to know how to do that? Do you want to know what the best Mintos lenders are?

Let’s go back to the basics and give a short introduction to Mintos. After that, we will go into the best Mintos loan originators, how I choose them, and a table with their metrics.

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What Is Mintos Again?

Mintos is currently the biggest and fastest-growing peer-to-peer lending platform in Europe. In their online loan marketplace, you can invest in all different types of loans. Mintos is the intermediary or middleman that connects the people who want to lend money with the people who need a loan.

Peer-to-peer lending is a way of alternative lending or alternative finance. Through the Mintos online lending market, you can buy loans and provide money for people looking for a loan.

Mintos has over 280,000 investors from 75+ different counties. Investors have funded over €5 million in loans since Mintos was funded in 2015, earning them average yields of 11.95%. Not too shabby.

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Currently, the loans at Mintos are issued by 68 loan originators. Each of those loan originators has its own risk profile and their own country, currency, and loan type that you can invest in.

As an investor, it’s entirely up to you what you want to invest in.

Why Should You Invest In Mintos?

Mintos is a peer-to-peer borrowing platform that enables you to invest in a personal loan, loans for small businesses (for upstart), car loans, consumer loans, home loans, and more.

People need to borrow money for all different kinds of things; they all have a different loan purpose. If people don’t have access to credit cards, have poor credit, can’t get small business lending or student loans – peer-to-peer platforms are the perfect solution.

The loan originators that issued loans on Mintos lend people money who can’t get money from a traditional bank. These loans have higher interest since lending money to people who aren’t funded by the bank is riskier.

These peer to peer loans give you a high interest rate, varying between 7% and 15% annualized. When you’re facilitating loans in another currency, you can even earn higher amounts of interest. Of course, higher interest often means higher risk.

Other crowdfunding or P2P lending platforms often offer unsecured loans. On the Mintos loan platform, it’s easy to invest in secured loans through their buyback guarantee. Mintos offers great returns. By selecting the right loan originators, you can reduce the lending risk!

What Is A Mintos Loan Originator?

On the Mintos platform, you can invest through different loan originators. A loan originator is a lending company or group. These companies are mostly fintech organizations and small businesses that offer loans to individuals.

Through these companies, you can lend money to all different kinds of creditors. You can decide what loans you invest in, what your ideal interest rate is, and the loan payment term is, and more.

Mintos Loan Originators Rating List

Let’s get straight to the point. Mintos is one of the P2P platforms where it’s important to moderate risk through analyzing their loan originators.

On the Mintos platform, you can find their list of loan originators with their core information. You can see how big they are, their average interest rate, and whether they offer a buy-back guarantee.

If you want more information, you can click on the loan originator and will get additional data.

We’ve summarized all that data for you and have made an overview of all the loan originators and their terms:

6 Steps To Select The Best Mintos Loan Originators

I’ve noticed that many loan originators are not what I am looking for, and many loan originators fit my needs exactly.

To know which Mintos loan originators are a fit for you, I’ve written down the analysis I did to check which loan originators I feel comfortable investing in.

This has slightly changed my investment approach. In the beginning, I was only looking at the Mintos ratings. It is important to check multiple ratings and compare them to end up with the portfolio you feel most comfortable with.

I’ve updated my Mintos auto-invest settings accordingly, lowering my risk of loan originator default significantly. Using auto-invest is a great way to reduce risk and invest while not spending much time on the platform.

If you’re not fully aware of the risks associated with peer-to-peer lending, I recommend you do some reading before putting your money into these platforms. It is relatively easy to minimize your risk on any platform with a little bit of research.

I want to stress that this analysis is something that I feel personally comfortable with. That doesn’t mean that this should be the same for you. As we’re talking about investing your money in a peer-to-peer lending platform, carefully consider what amount of risk you are willing to take.

We will be looking at:

1. Explore P2P rating
2. Mintos rating
3. Buyback guarantee
4. Country
5. Currency
6. Interest on delayed payments

1. ExploreP2P Rating

Before we’re looking at any loan originator, I’ve looked at the loan originator rating of Explore P2P. They have this great overview of loan originators together with their own ratings.

If you want to see everything in detail, you can do so here!

They start with the key financial information of each Mintos loan originator, where they post:

• Loans
• Equity
• Latest profit
• Last year profit
• Audited yes/no

Besides that, they give their own ratings. This is based on:

• Profit
• Capital
• Size
• Disclosure quality
• Track record

For my analysis, I’ve included Mintos loan originators with a score of 40 and above. In the full table towards the end of this post, I will disclose the loan originator’s exact rating.

You can make your own risk assessment and decide what rating will be the most comfortable for you.

Any loan originator with a score below 40 on the Explore P2P website is not listed on the table. I would say 40 out of 100 would include most loan originators that anyone would want to invest in.

Why did I pick 40? That is a great question.

The simple answer is that I found that it works for me at this moment in time. I might change this in the future when I find that something else will work better.

Let’s go through the other identified and filtered parameters when looking at the different Mintos loan originators.

2. Ratings At Mintos

In October 2020, Mintos adjusted its loan originator ratings. They decided to release a new way of measuring their risk, the Mintos Risk Score.

The Mintos Risk Score is based on the following:

• The company’s loan portfolio performance (40%)
• The efficiency of loan servicing (25%)
• Buyback strength (25%)
• A legal contract between Mintos and the loan originator (10%)

The risk score is between 1 (high risk) to 10 (low risk). If the score is not available, they will express this with W/D (Withdrawn or Defaulted).

Reasons why a score is withdrawn or defaulted:

1. There is not enough information.
2. There are no active loans listed for a long time.
3. The loan originator is suspended or defaulted.

I like comparing the two different ratings of loan originators that are provided by ExploreP2P and Mintos.

Preferably I don’t have my money invested with loan originators that are bringing a lot of risks. I will not invest in loan originators that have a rating of 5 or lower.

3. Buyback Guarantee

With a buyback guarantee, the loan originators offer to buy back the loan after 60 days of payment delay. I feel much more comfortable investing money in Mintos loan originators that are offering a buyback guarantee.

A buyback guarantee is such an easy way to minimize the risk of investing in peer-to-peer lending, so I want to minimize the risk in this regard. When selecting loans on Mintos, tick the box ‘Buyback Guarantee,’ and you’re all set.

If you’re checking out loans on Mintos, you will find that there will be more than enough choice of loans. If you choose loans with a buyback guarantee, you will find several loans of similar interest rates compared to when you select loans without a buyback guarantee.

Meaning that you will find Mintos loans of the same interest rates with or without a buyback guarantee. So why take the risk and select only loans without a buyback guarantee?

When loans start defaulting, your effective interest rate will go down – meaning that it would be wiser for your returns to select loans with a buyback guarantee.

4. Country

The countries are on this list as well. I personally don’t exclude loan originators because they are doing business in specific countries. For me, it’s more for information purposes, knowing which loan originator is located where.

Besides that, I want to spread my risk among different countries – different local economies. That way, I can diversify my investments.

When I notice that too much of any country is included in my Mintos portfolio, I will diversify among other loan originators.

I can imagine that other people want to exclude certain countries or markets from investing completely. If that is the case, you can only select the countries you want to invest in and start investing in Mintos immediately!

5. Currency

I’ve listed the currencies of the loan offered by the loan originators. Personally, I only want to invest in loans that are offered with the EUR currency since I’m not looking to invest in any other currencies at this moment.

When you want to invest in different currencies on Mintos, know that there are currency exchange fees. They vary from 0.5% to 2% per conversion. If the higher interest rates offset the currency exchange fees on Mintos, there is no need to worry about the fees.

Another thing you need to consider when you would want to exchange currencies is currency exchange risk. When you’re converting your EUR to RUB (Russian Rubles), you pay a certain exchange rate. When you want to exchange your money back to your original currency, you get another exchange rate.

The exchange rate of these currencies can fluctuate highly depending on macroeconomic factors or politics. This is the biggest risk when you’re exchanging currencies.

For Mintos, most loan originators are offering loans in EUR as well as in other currencies.

6. Interest On Late Loans

I have found that quite some of my loans with Mintos have been delayed. Of my current portfolio, 18% is delayed. That’s a lot.

When a borrower doesn’t repay their monthly payments on time, they enter a grace period. The grace period is normally used when people have repaid their loans on time, but there has been a delay. This can be at the bank, on national holidays, and more. After that grace period, there are 60 days until the buyback guarantee kicks in.

Some loan originators pay interest on delayed payments, and others don’t. There have been no defaults yet, but people have not always been paying on time.

Of course, I prefer investing in companies that pay interest on late payments. That leaves you with a higher return compared to when you’re not receiving interest on late payments.

Especially if you invest in short-term loans, interest on delayed payments can be convenient.

Depending on the loan availability on Mintos, I’m prioritizing this for my investments. At this moment, there are a lot of loans available on the Mintos marketplace. The interest rates are decently high, and my return is rising.

This means that I have the luxury of deselecting the loan originators who have no interest payment on delayed loans. At the moment of writing, only four loan originators are not offering interest on delayed loans.

One thing that I would like to point out is that some have a penalty for late payment. This means that you get a penalty amount instead of your interest on a late loan – this is kind of similar in my eyes.

Therefore I also invest in loans that have a penalty on late payments.

What About Defaulted Loan Originators?

With the ongoing pandemic, the list of loan originators who can’t pay back all outstanding loans has grown quickly. For companies that already had low ratings, the pandemic was the last push that led to repayment problems.

Yes, often, it was companies with low ratings, but that is no guarantee for the future.

Mintos will take care of the repayment from the defaulted loan originators. They have a list on their website with all loan originators that have trouble with repayment and how much they owe Mintos.

Here is a list of both defaulted and suspended loan originators:

What About Suspended Loan Originators?

Besides the defaulted loan originators, there are also suspended loan originators that are currently not paying. That’s why they are suspended from primary and secondary marketing, which means:

• You can’t buy any new investments from these loan originators.
• You can’t sell your investments with these loan originators to others.

Part of these companies will probably go bankrupt, while the other part of these companies will make payment agreements with Mintos to get back on their feet.

Why Should I Select My Loan Originators?

With Mintos, you can invest through the auto-invest feature and their feature. With auto-invest, you can choose the lenders you want to invest in. With Invest & Access, you can’t select the lenders you want to invest in.

Should I Diversify Or Select The Best Loan Originators?

Now you know how to use the Mintos ratings, the P2P explore ratings, and where to look for – you know how to do your research yourself. But which Mintos loan originators do you pick? And how many should you pick?

It depends on your personal preference and what you are comfortable with. Let’s take an example where you van €10,000 to invest.

When you invest €2,000 in 5 loan originators, you can choose the ones that have the least risk on paper. However, it is always possible for a loan originator to go bankrupt.

If that happens, you lose 20% of your portfolio in one go. You need to be invested for almost two years to make up for that loss.

When you invest €500 in 20 different loan originators, you won’t notice when one of them goes bankrupt. We still don’t want any bankruptcies, but you get the point. However, it’s important to take into account that the chance of a loan originator going bankrupt increases when you diversify into more loan originators.

It’s up to you which of these two scenarios would fit your investment style and your goals.

Conclusion Mintos Best Loan Originators

All these points leave us with 38 loan originators to invest in with Mintos, as listed above. These are the loan originators that I personally invest in.

Selecting the right loan originators will be one of the biggest contributors to your success on the platform. The chances of a loan originator going bankrupt are there. The more you want to focus on the best loan originators, the less diversification you will get.

You can select your own parameters in the table. My parameters are:

• Explore P2P lending rate of 40 or higher
• Mintos rating of 5 or higher
• Buyback guarantee on loans
• Currency EUR
• Interest on late payments

I am updating this list regularly, as the loan originators’ ratings change constantly, and new loan originators are added. If you find that any information in this article is outdated, please let me know in the comments below!

If you find that you’ve invested in some Mintos lender that you don’t feel comfortable with anymore, that’s easy to solve. Sell your investments on the secondary market, and you can get rid of them.

Please note that I’m not a professional advisor. This article is about me sharing my own experiences, and this is not investment advice.

How To Invest In These Loan Originators?

I love the auto-invest feature that Mintos has available – it saves time and automates getting the maximum return on your investments.

You can invest in these loan originators when you go to the Mintos platform and deposit money on the platform. You can determine which loan originators you want to invest in and who you want to lend your money to.

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If you want to know more detailed information about investing with Mintos, you can check out my Mintos review.

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Are you using Mintos? Which loan originators do you invest in?