If you’ve been following our journey to become a licensed investment platform, we’re thrilled to announce a milestone update – Mintos expects to receive the investment firm license issued by Latvia’s Financial Capital Market Commission (FCMC) at the end of August.
The new license comes with great investor benefits. As an investment firm, Mintos will be subject to strict investor protection rules under EU financial industry regulation, MiFID II. This includes organizational requirements around capital requirements and best execution, preventing conflicts of interest, and product governance. Investors will also be protected under the state-guaranteed investor protection system that safeguards up to €20 000 per investor.
To enjoy the benefits of licensed investing, new and existing investors will need to complete a quick and easy online Suitability & Appropriateness assessment in order to continue investing on Mintos, as well as a few other items which can be found in a checklist-format by logging into your account.
Regarding the Suitability & Appropriateness assessment, this has been available on Mintos for a couple of months and over 70% of investors who hold over 90% of investments on Mintos have already completed the assessment. If you still haven’t done so, we encourage you to complete the assessment now, so you can continue using your account after the license arrives. You will only need to do this once.
We look forward to all investors completing this assessment, so we can continue to service them and offer the new license benefits including new products in future. We believe the assessment itself is in the interests of all investors, since it ensures we offer products tailored to every individual’s profile and investment knowledge. Without this, some investors could be exposed to a level of risk they hadn’t anticipated.
Log in to your Mintos account to find a checklist of all the requirements you still need to fulfil. Several items on the checklist can be taken care of now, such as the Suitability & Appropriateness assessment, providing your tax details and ensuring contact information is up-to-date if you haven’t already done so. We’ll send the new user agreement by email soon after the investment firm license is received.
Once you receive the new user agreement, there will be a 30-day transition period to ensure there’s time to complete the necessary steps required, to get acquainted and accept the terms of the new user agreement. After the transition period, you will no longer be able to invest on Mintos without taking the Suitability & Appropriateness assessment. Investors with unverified accounts will also face account closure.
Investor categories
After the license is received, investor categories – which you may have noticed has been attributed to your investor profile already, for information purpose – will go live. Investor categories allocates each investor a “MiFID status” (retail, professional or eligible counterparty), and if you don’t agree with the category assigned to you, it will be possible to apply to change this once investor categories come into effect.
Notes
As we previously announced, Mintos will not only become a regulated marketplace, but also investments in loans will be transformed into the form of regulated financial instruments called Notes. We expect that first Notes will be available on the platform at the start of autumn this year, and gradually replace the current system of investments in claim rights by the first quarter of 2022.
As we embark on this exciting new stage in our business growth, we’re happy to have you with us. We’ll be sharing more information on every aspect of Mintos becoming a regulated marketplace soon.
If you have any other questions, feel free to join in the discussion over on our Mintos Community Hub on the topic.
