invest and access

Mintos Invest & Access Seems to Have Left ‘Normal Market Conditions’ for the First Time – Leaving Some Investors Surprised

wiseclerk 4 Comments

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.

 

New product: Mintos Invest and Access – What it is and My Opinion

wiseclerk 6 Comments

Mintos* will launch a new product offer called Invest & Access tomorrow. It was already unveiled and presented at the P2P Conference in Riga on Friday. Before I write about it watch the video below for about 10 minutes with Mintos CEO Martins Sulte explaining Mintos Invest and Access.

invest and access presentation riga
the video should autostart at the right point. If not it is at 2:29:22

The new offer makes it super-easy for investors to invest and automatically diversify through a very wide selection of loans. Mintos does that by investing the money in all loans on the platform that carry a buyback guarantee and are from originators that are at least 6 months on the platform. Mintos promises that investors will be able to cash out easily (subject to market demand) instantly, saying investors don’t need to bother about handling the loan selling on the seondary market. Mintos does that by selling the non-late loans to other investors.

The investor can still see how the portfolio he holds is composed on an overview page. One important aspect for the market dynamics on Mintos marketplace is that Invest & Access will invest before the autoinvests.

Mintos is cleary aiming to make it easy for new investors that don’t want to spend much time thinking about the investment and optmizing yields by giving them the average yield by just one click. The Invest & Acesss page will show the weighted average interest rate, which at the time I saw that page was showed as 11.98%. But the figure will change and update as market conditions fluctate and as the FAQ says it is not guaranteed.

One important point in the FAQ/footnotes is that the ‘instant access’ only applies to current loans. That means if the investors has e.g. 15% late loans, that would mean that he gets only 85% as instant withdrawal and for the remaining 15% has to wait until either the loan is bought back by the buyback or becomes current again (I suppose in that case the investor could trigger another cashout).

Investors can runs both Mintos Invest & Access as well as the existing autoinvests, should they which, but in that case Invest & Access would use any available cash the investor has first, therefore I would guess that there are rarely any funds left for the autoinvests to use.

My Opinion on Mintos Invest and Access

Mintos clearly offers a product that makes it as easy as possible, lowering the entry hurdles especially for new investors. And as Bondora Go&Grow* shows there is a high demand by investors for simplified products. Statistics published by Bondora show that in April 2019 63% of the new investments in that month where conducted via the Go&Grow product, which is constantly gaining over the other investment methods Bondora offers. Other examples are the Access products offered by British Assetz Capital*.

Looking at it from the perspective of an investor that is a little more experienced and willing to spend a little time Invest & Access does not seem an attractive offer. By definition it offers the weighted average interest rate.

By setting up own autoinvests at Mintos, keeping a good diversification and foregoing the highest risk, investors can currently achieve about 13-14% yield on Mintos. So if they would instead use the new product they would have about 2-3% lower yield, and have actually less control on which originators they invest in. An important point to consider, is that the value Mintos shows you, is the average interest rate, NOT the expected average yield. The yield will be significantly lower than the interest rate as Mintos will include buyback loans from originators with long grace periods or originators that do not pay interest income on delayed payment. Excatly those are typically avoided when investors configure their own autoinvests.

And concerning the argument of liquidity. Mintos is very liquid anyway. Without using the new product it is no problem to liquidate a portfolio within a few minutes to  a few hours it just depends on the price. Sure you might have to offer a discount. Maybe depending 0.2%-0.6% on average. But that is a small price if you had the higher yields before.

So would I recommend using Invest & Access over the ‘traditional’ way of setting up own autoinvest? There is one use-case I would. If an investor wants to invest very short-time (for whatever reason ‘parking’ money) for less than say 120 days, than it is worth considering.

In my opinion on why Mintos launched the new product, there are actually two reasons:

  1. there is demand for a simplified product and this new product shall satisfy that
  2. the new product will help on the sales site for attracting and onboarding new orignators. Originators that can only offer rates that are below the average interest rate on the Mintos platform so far were hard to sell. With Invest & Access they will be just part of the bundle and automatically sold (once the originator has been on the platform 6 month)

That brings us to an interesting point. How will Mintos Invest & Access the market dynamics? The big factor here is that Mintos Invest & Access happens BEFORE autoinvest and manual investment. There are already (even before launch) speculations and fears of investors that it might bring down interest rates or ‘force’ them to use the new product to avoid cash drag, but I think it is much to early to make any prediction what might be the outcome. But I sure am curious what this will do to the activity on the Mintos marketplace.

What are your opinions on the new product? Please share them in the comments. Thx.

mintos invest and access

P.S.: The following interview with the Mintos CEO was recorded just before the announcement of the new product, therefore it does not cover Invest and Access – but it has a lot of information on the current state of Mintos.

(Source: Bernhard Hummel)