Best Mintos lenders ➕ How to pick the Safest Loan Originators?

Do I really have to choose the loan originators on Mintos?

Can’t I let Mintos do the work for me?

Today I will tell you if and how to avoid ❌ the worst Mintos lenders

I will also point out you powerful resources to find the best Mintos lenders on your own (and live happily)

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65 Loan Originators are on Mintos today and beware that all of them can fail, close, collapse just anytime.

Most of these lenders are similar to each other, but lately some very different and exotic lenders have arrived. Should I worry?

Today you have searched on Google “What are the best Mintos lenders?”  Well done!

You are probably an advanced Mintos’ investor who (..is lazy) wants to know how reliable these lenders are and choose only the best or only the safest.

At the end of this reading, you will know:

1. What can be considered a good Mintos lender
2. How to scoop by yourself the best Mintos lenders
3. A simple Portfolio building with the best lenders in 60 seconds
4. The list of my best Mintos lenders (don’t scroll down yet)

What are the characteristics of a good Mintos lender?

Safety is all that matters to me, but let’s dive in…

Read the definitive Mintos review

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Why should I worry to choose my Mintos lenders?

Worrying is a useless emotion.

I want data and information to act, not to worry.

Keep reading..

On Mintos I basically have only two ways to invest.

One is through the totally automated “invest & access” and one is by setting up an “auto-invest portfolio”.

Mintos automation are just great, but I’m free to upgrade a part of my portfolio that is not in the “invest & Access”. To do so I can just pick some of my loans with a custom auto-invest strategy. I do it especially by picking the lenders that have a safer profile for me of just a nicer risk/reward ratio.

Everybody knows that so far a few Mintos lenders have ceased operations. In all cases, those were small loan companies and the impact has been limited.

It should not come as a surprise that some lenders can default. I consider this absolutely normal, even healthy and it is likely to happen again. Period.

I am aware that investing in assets with a return hovering 10% is a risky practice. My thing is that I really enjoy taking risks when the reward is reasonable and in this case, 10% is reasonable. This is why I like Mintos and I am using my time to write about it today (instead of going to fishing).

The most important thing to invest in a safe and transparent environment.

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📈 Let’s rate the Mintos ratings

How do I dare ta rate the Mintos lenders ratings?

…I’ve already dared.

Last year Mintos introduced a quality rating for its lenders. So now the question is:

Should I trust Mintos lenders’ ratings or not?

 

Some investors are critic about it but I’d say it is becoming a very good preliminary indicator of the overall quality of the lender.

In addition to this, Mintos opened up the road to other P2P marketplaces to do the same, improve transparency and also start to rate their loans. Grupeer, Viventor and Peerberry have started to show more details about their lenders and I expect more marketplaces to do  something similar.

The risk assessment of each loan originator is performed by the Mintos risk team, not by an external agency. The model that inspires the Mintos ratings is the one used by Fitch Ratings.

Good to know. Now let’s go on..

My priority when investing is not to lose money.

Would you invest in a loan company that is:

• Financially weak?
• With management that may lack experience?
• With a limited track record?

These three wonderful characteristics in the list above can be found in the “C” rated loans definition of the official Mintos ratings.

This is why advanced investors avoid buying the most of the “C” rated loans if the interest rate is not high enough to justify the higher risk.

“C” rated loans should pay higher interests.

For the sake of transparency the “I & A” can also buy “C” rated loans. Lenders just have to have been on Mintos for at least 6 months to see their loans into the I&A.

My experience? I’ve never had too many low rated loans because of the “I & A” nor “strange surprises”. In the first months of I&A a few investors reported having found late loans bought by the automation.

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How much do I invest for every lender?

In the last four years investing and being in contact with hundreds of investors, I’ve learned something valuable and I share it here.

My only goal on Mintos is to invest with the lowest risk, not for the highest interest (until the yield will be reasonable). I know I don’t share this same goal with many others but it’s ok for me. I did not share the same opinion with many investors about some aggressive P2b websites and also about Housers and I have no regrets.

Since I also need to fight cash drag I let a small percentage of “I &A” to work for me. If you didn’t know, I & A has priority on the marketplace over the auto-invest.

Invest & access is not evil.

I also use manual invest for testing reasons but it is very time-consuming (unless you set up and save your search filters).

I am more focused on avoiding the worst Mintos lenders rather than investing only with those considered the best or the highest-rated.

What I do is to avoid high percentages of low-rated loans and overweight the percentage of good-rated loans.

As simple as this and it is working great since 2016.

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How does the buyback guarantee work?

Easy.

Mintos most loved feature ever is the Buyback guarantee.

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What is the Mintos buyback guarantee?

If a loan I’ve bought is covered by this guarantee and the borrower is late with the payments more than 60 days the lender has to buy back my loan from me and give me the money I invested.

This is not only a promise. I see it working every day in my portfolio where dozen of loans go late and are regularly bought back by the lenders. No questions.

In some cases, I’m also expected to be paid interest on the overdue debt and some penalty.

What a wonderful world…

The way they have implemented this formula is working fine and the decentralization of the risk is a good thing.

The “invest & access” portfolio is only allowed to buy loans covered by the buyback formula.

The problem with the buyback (even if it is working fine so far) is that it may induce a false sense of security.

This is why some advanced investors prefer to also use the custom Autoinvest on Mintos to overweight or exclude some lenders and implement advanced settings.

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I don’t want Mintos to guarantee my loans

Am I crazy? Is this a typo?

No no. You’ve read right.

Let’s recap.

[bctt tweet=”If a lender goes out of business, Mintos doesn’t have to pay me back out of his own pocket and this is perfect” username=””]

Why do I prefer to lose money in case of a lender default instead of being refunded by Mintos?

I do not want the marketplace to use its finances to cope with defaults because I believe it is much safer the way it is.

I need the referee to be impartial.

Mintos job, as a loans marketplace, is to match loans with investors in a safe environment. That’s all.

So the main difficulty is not only to avoid cash drag to investors but also to provide enough investors to the credit agencies.

As an investor, I know very well that I have to risk my money to earn more money at the end of the investment. There are no shortcuts. I also know that investing in loans can only take a limited part of my total portfolio because I consider it a high-risk practice.

If I lose 100% of my savings in P2P loans I should not blame the P2P platforms.

If my portfolio is equally distributed on the 65 lenders the risk of losing a lot of money if 1 or 2 my lenders’ default is still limited. Moreover, if the loans I buy have a direct structure I will still have the borrowers bond to me. By the way, I am not a big fan of equally distributed portfolios. Keep reading and you’ll find out why.

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🚩Mintos expelled some loan originators

Most people don’t know this.

 

Mintos so far has been a watchful referee and it has expelled or reduced activity of some lenders before the lenders could bring damage to the investors.

I appreciated it because it gave me a feeling of being protected, but it wasn’t always the case.

Mintos has been also quite lagging in some other cases to adjust the ratings of some very under-performing lenders.

Unfortunately, I don’t have all the information to judge if they dealt in the right way or not.

What I know is that at the moment Mintos downgrades a lender to “D” class, that loans will not be bought by the automated portfolios that filter out the lowest-rated loans.

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％ What is the default rate on Mintos?

When I hear that too many lenders on Mintos default I get a little pissed off.

Why?

Because Mintos has processed about 4.700M€ (= 4.700.000.000€).

Only less than one million euro has defaulted and 3M€ are late over 60 days. Let’s also consider that the 60+ days late loans can be considered almost defaulted.

Do the math and tell me if there are too many defaults on Mintos.

Personally, I’d be more worried if they’d say to have zero default since it would be unnatural.

Mintos alternatives

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Mintos statistics

Mintos is very transparent about its numbers. I still remember I was impressed by being able to see their statistics even if I was not registered yet on the platform.

I was very sceptical about Mintos and I waited months before investing.

Here below are the Mintos loans statistics in EUR.

It is easy to detect that the worst loan originators on Mintos are mainly in the class of:

• Business loans
• Invoice financing
• Mortgage loans

The biggest default so far is not Eurocent but it is Aforti (it is still not defaulted and here you can follow Aforti stock).

Debifo is also performing very bad.

Debifo is the only Mintos loan originator not to offer any buyback guarantee loan (why was it admitted…).

Mogo, the biggest lender on Mintos, recently announced it will offer also loans not covered by the buyback formula with higher interests.

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❌ Why I don’t exclude certain lenders?

First of all: Not all lenders are the same.

Size:

• Mintos biggest lender has originated 950M€ loans.
• Mintos smallest lender has originated 5M€ loans.

This is one more reason not to equally weight the lenders.

Let’s keep this in mind:

Every time I exclude one lender I am overweighting the others.

Every time I exclude a lender I am reducing my diversification thus I am augmenting my risk on the platform.

So, yes, some loans bought by the I&A are not excellent, but I let it work anyway so I will be partially exposed to those small lenders.

It is safer to be exposed to 50 average lenders than only to 5 popular ones, this is why I only reduce/exclude the least rated lenders.

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Assess your Mintos Portfolio

Mogo doesn’t pay interest on delay? Who cares?

When I invest in lenders that don’t pay interest on delayed loans I am reducing my returns.

But if every single time I exclude a lender I am increasing my risk on the platform. This is why I am very careful before excluding some lenders.

Mogo is the biggest lender on Mintos. I will not exclude it.

This is why I don’t exclude lenders that don’t pay interest on delays and I don’t exclude lenders that have long “grace periods”.

Average grace period for me is 5%. Should I exclude lenders that have a grace period above 5 days I will dramatically lower my diversification.

[bctt tweet=”At the very moment you know and understand this numbers you won’t need me or anyone else to pick your own best Mintos lenders” username=””]

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What are the best Mintos lenders?

I’d suggest you pick yourself and don’t blame others for mistakes.

I am late to publish the list of the best and worst Mintos lenders and Explore P2P is already doing an excellent job in scoring the Mintos lenders since 2017. Chapeau, friends.

Here is the graphic result of their scoring model:

Their ratings are helping many advanced investors since 2017.

Lately, I’ve noticed there is less gap between Mintos’ official ratings and Explore P2P ratings on the highest-rated ones.

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My strategy to avoid the Mintos worst lenders

[bctt tweet=”My default rate on Mintos is extremely low (2 loans out of 5800 are later than 60 days)” username=””]

Some time ago I uploaded a video where I show what I’d do if I want a portfolio that is an upgrade from the invest & access.

It is an easy portfolio without sophistication but that is achievable by the average investor that wants something more than the Invest & access.

This portfolio will just follow the Mintos ratings and will avoid buying the lowest-rated. There is no guarantee that the lenders inside will not have any problem but it is a very good starting point.

Here is the video with what I like to consider a safer setup:

 

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List of Mintos good and/or bigger lenders

This list is always changing and it is safe to also rely on the updated Mintos’ ratings.

The loan originators below are ordered by size (bigger above), not by rating or quality:

• Mogo ⭐️
• Creditstar (the new loans are now on Lendermarket P2P)⭐️
• Delfin group ⭐️
• CreamFinance
• Iutecredit ⭐️
• IDfinance ⭐️
• Acema
• EBV Finance
• Placet Group
• Watu Credit ⭐️
• Credius
• Kiviku
• Credissimo ⭐️
• AgroCredit
• Cashcredit
• Dineo 

There are also smaller good lenders but it is rather useless to bother trying to rank lenders that have an actual loan portfolio on Mintos below 4-5M€ since the impact of a default would be not significant.

I will never be tired enough to repeat that even big and established lenders can suffer problems or go belly up for several of reasons.

Since I can’t avoid default I can only focus of setting up my portfolio in a safer way.

I’d say that a Mintos’ lender that is:

1. Old
2. Big
3. Geographically diversified
4. Rated above 5 (mintos score)
5. With all financial statements published

…can be a good candidate to be in the list of my best Mintos lenders.

 

Now visit mintos on your terms

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🛑 Do not trust my ratings. Do not trust this website.

Why do I say that?

Now instead of rushing and create a portfolio with the lenders above listed, let’s learn something that will not change with the fluctuation of the ratings:

It is more important to reduce on bad lenders instead of focusing only on the best ones. This is why I am not a big fan of portfolios equally shared on all lenders.

 

Now it’s your turn!

How do you manage your Mintos portfolio?

Do you exclusively rely on I&A?

Will you try the last strategy to rise the quality of your portfolio?

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Mintos Lenders FAQ

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