Mintos review 2025: €2,200 at 14% interest

The P2P platform Mintos has had a turbulent history. Has Europe’s largest private loan provider now overcome its rough patch? Is it worth investing again, or are these just empty marketing promises?

I have been reviewing Mintos since 2016 and know the platform inside out. Here, I will show you what the P2P market leader can really do and when and for whom it makes sense to get started!

What exactly is Mintos?

The Latvian company Mintos is one of the pioneers of the P2P market. Private individuals like you and me use their money to finance loans for other private individuals or companies. In return, we receive attractive interest rates.

This allows us to achieve double-digit returns or even generate passive income through P2P.

Platforms such as Debitum, Monefit, Fintown and Mintos are the hub of this lucrative business. This is where borrowers and lenders come together. These providers also take care of recovering our capital if payments are delayed.

• At Mintos, it was precisely this important process that was problematic: many investors have had bad reviews of loan defaults since the start of the COVID crisis.
• I am also still waiting for repayments, but have received partial payments repeatedly over the last few months.
• This dry spell now seems to be over: up to 14% is waiting for you again, with no significant (new) defaults.

As with all P2P transactions, there is a serious risk involved with Mintos. The reviews from the last crisis could well repeat themselves if problems arise in the future. Read on to find out whether this investment could still be worthwhile for you. But first, let’s start with the key facts:

Business model

Mintos already has more than 10 years of experience in the P2P business. How has the company managed to stay in business for so long and build up a user base of over half a million investors? Through a functioning business model!

The concept is very simple:

• Private individuals and companies need loans for a wide variety of purposes. However, traditional banks reject many applicants or simply work too slowly.
• Various companies offer an alternative: fast and uncomplicated, but with higher interest rates.
• These ‘loan originators’ grant loans, but want to refinance their expenses quickly in order to continue growing.
• They find what they are looking for on a marketplace such as Mintos: private investors like you and me buy the loans and receive a large portion of the interest earned in return.

This approach is hugely popular: the P2P market is growing steadily, as a glance at my P2P lending comparison clearly shows. More than half a million users on Mintos alone speak for themselves!

The continued growth is no surprise when you consider the overwhelmingly positive reviews from users.

• P2P lending offers very high interest rates, some of them even up to 24% per year, as my Ventus Energy reviews show!
• Past crises, such as the COVID crash, have been handled very well by the platforms. Even Mintos’ problems were minimal, objectively speaking. The biggest exception: the real estate crisis of recent years has clouded my Estateguru experience quite a bit.
• This investment class also offers high flexibility: secondary markets where you can sell your investments immediately or offers such as Monefit Smartsaver mean that your capital is quickly available.
• You can diversify your investment widely and thus minimise risks! At Mintos alone, you will find several thousand loans from a wide range of countries and industries.

Mintos itself also receives a share of all transactions. This generates revenue of around €12 million per year, which is used to finance the company.

Mintos is fully regulated by the Latvian Central Bank. This means that your deposits are covered by deposit insurance up to €20,000. This does not protect you against poor performance – that remains your risk – but you are protected against fraud or operational errors on the part of Mintos.

But don’t worry: although both the loan originator and Mintos take a cut from each loan, investors still get to keep up to 14% interest per year!

Register and secure your bonus

Want to try out Mintos and earn up to 14% interest? No problem! Signing up takes just a few minutes. All you need is:

• A smartphone with internet access
• A form of identification: passport, identity card or residence permit
• A working email address
• A bank account

80/100

Points

Return: 10% interest

Investors: over 600,000

Receive €25: invest €1,500 within 30 days

REDEEM BONUS*

1. Create account

Enter your first and last name (as it appears on your ID document) and email address. Mintos will send you an email later to confirm your address.

The first step is to create your user account. I recommend using my registration link to do so and secure up to €25 in bonus credit.

2. Confirm identity

Mintos must ensure that you are who you say you are. You have probably had similar experiences with banks, brokers or other P2P providers.

During this process, you will be asked to provide various personal details. The provider is obliged to collect this information, so you cannot skip this step.

However, in my review, it only takes a few minutes to fill in all the fields.

The last step is to verify your ID document and take a selfie. Mintos uses the service provider Veriff, which handles the process automatically. You don’t need to speak to a service representative; the process is completely automated.

Deposit money and invest

After a short time (in my experience, less than 5 minutes), your data will be verified and your account will be opened. You can now deposit money via bank transfer. There are no minimum amounts.

The money will be in your account almost immediately. Alternatively, you can set up a direct debit from your bank account via your Mintos profile. However, this method requires a minimum amount of €50.

Once your money has arrived in your Mintos account, you can get started right away. You basically have two options:

1. Manual investment: You choose which loans, real estate or other projects you want to invest your capital in. This requires a lot of effort (especially if you want to invest a large amount of money in a wide range of areas), but it also gives you full control.
2. Autoinvest: You specify the type of loans you want your money to be invested in, and Mintos takes care of the rest. This means no effort on your part, but you also have less control over what happens to your money.

In the nearly 10 years that I have been investing with Mintos, I have had experience with both options. They each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Lending, real estate and more: my review of Mintos products

Mintos is well known and respected as a marketplace for P2P lending, where both the company and investors have by far the most experience. However, in recent years, the range of services has been expanded to attract new investors and offer existing customers new opportunities for diversification.

Currently available on Mintos:

• P2P lending
• Corporate bonds
• Real estate
• A money market fund called ‘Smart Cash’

I only use the P2P lending services that I have already introduced to you. This is not because the other products are bad – there are simply better alternatives in every category!

Bonds

Many investors have bonds in their portfolios. Safe government bonds are particularly popular, but higher-yielding corporate bonds are also regularly purchased.

At Mintos, you can now also invest in such corporate bonds. On a subpage full of bugs, various claims are made:

• Bonds would normally require high minimum amounts in the 5-digit range
• High fees would normally be incurred for purchase and administration
• The capital would be tied up for a long period of time

The problem: None of these statements are true today! Almost every broker now offers bonds, which you can often invest in starting at just €1. These include, for example:

• Trade Republic: Offers over 600 government and corporate bonds starting at €1. Read more in my Trade Republic review
• ING: ING offers more than 7,500 government and corporate bonds. Read more in my ING DiBa review
• Comdirect: With over 76,000 different bonds, Comdirect has built up a huge offering.
• CapTrader: With more than 1 million bonds (government, currency and corporate bonds) from all over the world, CapTrader is the clear market leader. Read more in my CapTrader review.

No fees other than the usual brokerage fees apply for either purchase or management (at Trade Republic, for example, only €1 per transaction), and the shares can be sold on the stock exchange at any time.

With Mintos, on the other hand, you only have access to three companies: two credit brokers who grant P2P loans via the platform and one company that produces cotton in the Baltic States. The interest rates range between approximately 9% and 14%. The risk is not insignificant in all three cases, as your capital would be lost in the event of insolvency, for example.

You will immediately notice that the interest rates and risk are roughly equivalent to what you can achieve with personal loans on Mintos! The company has thus created a competing product to its own P2P solution that offers no significant advantages and is easily outperformed by the competition.

Secondary market

My conclusion is therefore that Mintos bonds are not a bad product per se; however, I see no reason to invest here. If I want to buy bonds, I prefer to turn to an established broker who has significantly more experience in this area and offers better terms!

80/100

Points

Return: 10% interest

Investors: over 600,000

Receive €25: invest €1,500 within 30 days

REDEEM BONUS*

Real estate

Another new offering is real estate, in which you can invest from as little as €50. In return, you receive interest payments financed from rental income. However, Mintos is not telling you the whole truth here either:

• You do not invest directly in a property, so you do not own a building or part of one.
• Instead, you invest your money in debt securities based on corporate bonds.
• The issuer is an Austrian real estate company called Bambus.io.
• The interest rates are fairly average at 6 to 8% per year.

You are also taking a considerable risk here, as you are entrusting your money to a company. In addition, your capital may be tied up for a very long time: the terms can be several years. Although it is possible to exit early via the secondary market, there is no guarantee that you will actually find a buyer for your investment.

Here, too, the same applies: Mintos does not offer a bad deal overall. However, the competition offers significantly more.

For example, Fintown offers me around 8% for rented properties and up to 15% for development projects. The Vihorev Group, which is behind this provider, has also been extremely successful since 2014 and has the necessary experience to handle such projects profitably. That gives me, as an investor, a much better feeling!

You can find out more about Fintown in my article on my review of Fintown.

Smart-Cash

Mintos offers you an interest product called ‘Smart Cash’. What initially looks like a call money account is actually an investment in a capital market fund. This is the BlackRock ICS Euro Liquidity Fund.

Your capital goes into this fund and generates interest there: in 2024, the fund generated 3.8%, which is slightly above the average interest rate. In addition, your money can be withdrawn quickly and is usually available on the same day. There are no fees for deposits or withdrawals.

Dabei ist jedoch zu beachten: 

• There is no deposit protection for your capital. However, in the event of Mintos going bankrupt, your money is still safe as it is held in a special fund.
• The interest rates are not guaranteed. The fund could generate significantly more or less income in the future.
• Blackrock charges a fee of 0.1% per year. Mintos itself adds another 0.19%, reducing your interest by 0.3%.

For the third time, I have to say: The offer is solid, but not earth-shattering. Many competitors offer more here.

• With the ING instant access savings account, you receive 2.75% interest in the first four months. After that, the rate drops to a meagre 1%. However, both rates are guaranteed! Your money is also protected by deposit insurance. Find out more in my ING DiBa review
• Trade Republic offers 2.25% interest. This amount depends on the European base rate and may fall further in the future. However, your money is protected by deposit insurance up to €100,000. You can find out more in my article on Trade Republic interest rates
• Do you want high interest rates and full liquidity, but are willing to accept a little more risk? Then Monefit is the right place for you! Here you get 7.5% through P2P lending and can withdraw your money at any time. You can find out more in my Monefit review.

My review of Mintos: With this portfolio, I earn 14% interest

I have been investing with Mintos since 2016 and have had both good and bad reviews during this time. My interest earnings have also fluctuated greatly. However, at 13.72%, they are currently very attractive!

Overall, I have made over €1,100.00 in profits with Mintos so far. A look at my returns shows that things are currently going very well:

• I only use the P2P offering. As already mentioned, bonds, real estate and smart cash are simply not attractive to me – for such investments, I prefer to rely on providers with more experience and better products.
• Another special feature is that my Mintos portfolio consists solely of loans from six credit companies. I deliberately only invest in companies that I know personally and where I can be sure that my money will be repaid on time.

This is how I will invest in the future

It’s no secret that Mintos has been through a difficult period! Since the beginning of the COVID crisis, things have been turbulent and defaults on repayments have been increasing. I too have been waiting for my money for years. Currently, around €250 is still outstanding, which is about a fifth of my defaulted loans.

However, Mintos has made every effort to collect the payments and has actually recovered a large portion of the capital! The current figures also look good:

• Since the end of the COVID phase, there have been no further significant defaults.
• The interest rates available have risen sharply again – currently up to 14%.
• The number of users and the total amount financed have also increased significantly again.

Currently, the platform seems to be on an upward trend! Therefore, I will also invest more in Mintos again. At the moment, Mintos accounts for only around 3.3% of my total P2P portfolio (over €67,000) with €2,270.00. So there will soon be a rebalancing here.

However, despite all the excitement, we must not forget that the last crash hit Mintos hard. Although they were able to turn things around, the damage to users was considerable. And the next economic crisis is guaranteed to come sooner or later.

Based on these reviews, it is important to diversify sufficiently and not put all your eggs in one basket!

You can find more providers of personal loans to diversify your P2P portfolio in my P2P lending ranking.

And you can find useful tips for investing in general in my report on the best investments at the moment.

What are the risks associated with Mintos?

The number of loan originator defaults rose to a peak in the early days of the coronavirus crisis, with more than 80 million euros in outstanding payments accumulating! This was an amount that was now missing from investors’ accounts.

Fortunately, the P2P platform already had experience with such problems. This enabled Mintos to process recoveries quickly and effectively. 73 of the 80 million euros were recovered fairly quickly.

For investors like you and me, this means two things above all:

1. The often abstract risk associated with P2P lending is real and should be taken seriously. Past reviews at Mintos have clearly demonstrated this.
2. Mintos has proven time and again that it knows its business and can recover defaulted capital. However, waiting times can be considerable – some loans have been overdue for four years and will take even longer to be repaid in full.

It is important to keep this in mind before investing in Mintos! For me personally, the platform is still worthwhile because the interest rates are very attractive. In addition, my reviews from past crises make me confident about the future: they have proven that they can actually get investors’ money back!

Of course, you may have a completely different opinion. Especially if you are dependent on the money you have invested, the repayment delays we have seen in the past could be unacceptable.

80/100

Points

Return: 10% interest

Investors: over 600,000

Receive €25: invest €1,500 within 30 days

REDEEM BONUS*

Advantages and disadvantages of Mintos

Based on my reviews and the current situation, I see the following advantages and disadvantages with Mintos:

P2P lending and taxes: What you need to know at Mintos

Since 2022, Mintos has been an investment company licensed under EU law. However, this distinction has been accompanied by a number of changes, not all of which are positive for investors.

The P2P platform is required to deduct a 5% withholding tax from your profits.

• You can offset this against the capital gains tax you have to pay in your tax return.
• Investors who have received less than the €1,000 savings allowance can also reclaim the withholding tax.
• In my experience, the process is very simple and reliable, but it is an additional effort that costs time and energy.

Interesting: Mintos plans to reduce withholding tax to 0%. Find out how this will work in my interview with Mintos CEO Martins Sulte

As is standard for P2P platforms, Mintos will provide you with a tax report for your tax return with just a few clicks. You can then forward this document to your tax office.

Profits from personal loans are subject to withholding tax and solidarity surcharge totalling 26.3% plus any applicable church tax. Of course, you can also use your tax-free allowance of up to €1,000 per year.

Alternatives to Mintos

The P2P market has grown rapidly in recent years and now offers the right platform for every taste. There are also several alternatives to Mintos that may be of interest to you:

Highest return: Ventus Energy

Mintos stands out with high interest rates of up to 14%. Another provider from Riga can only smile wearily at this: Ventus Energy offers investments in energy projects with 19% interest, which you can increase to up to 24% through special promotions!

However, the disadvantages are the high minimum investment of €1,000 and the serious risk involved. But if you are looking for the highest returns, this could be the right place for you.

58/100

Points

Up to 17% interest with energy projects

The energy projects are already generating profits

Get a 1% extra bonus (60 days) + 5% cashback

REDEEM BONUS*

Small but excellent marketplace: Debitum Investments

Debitum Network also uses the concept of a marketplace for P2P lending from different originators. Don’t be fooled by the very small number of users: this is a very transparent, regulated and multi-secured provider offering interest rates of up to 16%!

This has earned Debitum the top spot in my P2P lending ranking. If you are looking for a wide range of loans and are not interested in Mintos, Debitum is the right place for you. My reviews have also been overwhelmingly positive so far!

93/100

Points

Sustainable returns of 9-13% per year

Entry is possible from just €10 per credit bundle

1% bonus on your investment

REDEEM BONUS*

Mintos Community reviews: What users say

Of course, I’m not the only one who has already reviewed Mintos! In general, the opinion of new users seems to be overwhelmingly positive. Those who have been around for a while and weathered the crisis are often less enthusiastic. But even here, many users have returned to the platform after a long break.

However, most investors are not really ‘hyped’ about it. Considering the rollercoaster ride of the past, this is understandable. Mintos has a lot to make up for here. However, the signs point to growth. This is also reflected in the confident comments from the community:

80/100

Points

Return: 10% interest

Investors: over 600,000

Receive €25: invest €1,500 within 30 days

REDEEM BONUS*

Conclusion: Will Mintos still be worthwhile in 2025?

My reviews confirm that the P2P giant has finally turned the corner and is once again offering reliable high interest rates of around 14%. Investors are also returning in droves: over 600,000 users are currently registered.

Some loans from the COVID period are still not fully repaid, but the recovery process is underway. The P2P platform has thus passed its acid test – an advantage over competitors who have never been exposed to such a situation!

The defaults show that the risk of P2P lending is real and should be taken seriously. At the same time, however, it is also clear that recovery processes work and that an investment can be extremely worthwhile despite the risks.

I will therefore invest significantly more in Mintos again in the future. In the past, I had reduced my capital after mixed reviews during the COVID crash.

The additional investment opportunities (real estate, bonds and smart cash) don’t really impress me. The competitors simply offer more in this area! Nevertheless, they are a nice extra that will certainly convince some investors.

When it comes to real estate, I will continue to entrust my money to Fintown. However, based on my experience, Mintos is an excellent choice for pure P2P investments!

FAQ – Frequently asked questions about Mintos