In June Mintos* introduced the Invest & Access product which was designed to make it as easy as possible for investors to invest on Mintos. You can read my article about the introduction here. One main aspect offered was that it promised high liquidity, which came with the disclamer ‘you should be able to access your money anytime under normal market conditions’. Another restriction was that this applied only to current loans, so with a typical portfolio of about 20-30% lates, investors could cash out about 70-80% of the portfolio fast.

I doubt that many investors observed the “under normal market conditions” part of the offer. And those who did, probably saw it as a theoretical definition, rather than a real possibility.

Well now, 6  months later, we observe the first time Mintos Invest & Access have left the ‘Normal market conditions’ state. Investors requesting withdrawals from their Invest&Access account since Friday report they received only part of the requested amount so far (about 700 out of 2000 Euro here; and 780 out of 9800 Euro here; there are further examples known to me.). Several investors expressed surprise that they could not cash out current loans fast.
Cashouts requested up to  Thursday are reported to have been completed as expected

The cause of course is that the liquidity of Invest&Access is dependent on Mintos being able to sell the loan part of investors wanting to cash out to other investors.

On Friday around noon, the Central Bank of Kosovo announced that it had revoked the licenses of Monego and Iute Kosovo loan originators which both had loans listed on Mintos. In the afternoon many investors sold loans from those originators through the Mintos secondary market until Mintos suspended the trading of these loans around 5:04pm (CET).
Following these occurences this seems to have for the first time on Mintos created higher cashout demands than requests for investing on reinvesting on the Invest&Access product and this is why some investors are seeing partial/delayed withdrawals currently. It is unknown whether the I&A product has a buffer to soften the impact of such cases, but it seems not (or it has been depleted in this instance)

Edit to clarify: the Invest&Access product behaves as described in the small print, it is just that some investors seem to have different expectations and gauged the associated risks differently. Investing in p2p lending is a high risk investment.

I’ve contacted Mintos for comment on the current liquidity situation of I&A but have not yet received a reply.

If you are an Invest&Access investor and want to cashout, you might not be aware that you have the option to normally list the loans on the secondary market. Therefore if you want to skip the invest&access selling queue (which I assume exists), you can just list your loans. Offering 0.1% to 0.2% discount might be sufficient to sell them. I am not advocating this, just informing you that it is possible to try that.