When a startup begins talking about “hundreds of thousands of customers” – this becomes a great achievement to leverage for marketing purposes, but it also takes responsibilities to the next level for the whole team. With this in mind, here we are at Mintos in November 2019, operating a marketplace with 215 000 investors, looking to reach 300 000 milestone in a matter of a few months! This is a great milestone to take a closer look at the people and habits that make our marketplace: Mintos investors.
The growth path
Mintos’ growth has been synchronised across all relevant channels throughout the years. We started 2018 with 43 000 investors. After reaching 100 000 investors on Mintos in January 2019, each month we have seen a growing inflow of new investors joining our marketplace. From January to October 2019, an average of 10 500 investors that are looking for opportunities to invest in loans and earn were joining Mintos each month. At times, balancing investors’ demand and loan supply was a challenge for us.
We have just reached the milestone of EUR 4 billion in total loans funded on Mintos. So far, this amount is split across 20 million borrowers’ loans originated in more than 30 countries and 5 continents of the world, available for investors in 9 international currencies. A global character of Mintos and the unmatched diversification that’s our unique feature is a result of loans being originated across the parallels and meridians of the world: from Denmark to the South African Republic, and from Mexico to Indonesia.
This scaling at the global level is supported by Mintos team’s scaling – more than 100 new employees have joined the company during 2019 to build great products and provide excellent service for the growing investor base. As a result, today we are 170 people strong team.
Mintos and investors: globality
We have had a global mindset from the very start of Mintos. In 2015, we were serving investors from 41 countries, but the first joiners were investors from Latvia and other Baltic countries. Today, 215 000 Mintos investors come from 85 countries, with the dominant presence of investors from Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, etc. To serve investors, Mintos is currently available in 7 languages: English, Czech, German, Latvian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, and we will launch Dutch soon. Our Investor Service team speaks 12 languages, servicing approximately 2000 investor requests every week with an average response time of 74 minutes. 85% of almost one thousand investors reviewing Mintos on Trustpilot have rated us as excellent and great, translating to a score of 4.3 out of 5 stars.
Habits, activities and preferences
The total amount of loans funded on Mintos since 2015 comes to EUR 4 billion as of November 2019. Already in the first week after joining Mintos, investors invest an average of EUR 1100. In average, Mintos investors have an outstanding balance of EUR 4 725 invested across 241 different loans. With an average interest rate of 11.9% (as of November 2019), Mintos investors have earned EUR 70 million in interest from borrowers.
When it comes to investment strategies, investors show different preferences. Some investors use only one investment tool, some combine different options Mintos offers for convenient and easy investing. As it has been the case so far, Auto Invest remains the most popular investment tool among investors. 33% of Mintos investors use only Auto Invest for their investing. Manual investing is a preferred way of investing for 10% of Mintos investors, while 8% of investors choose Invest & Access as the only Mintos product they use to invest. 24% of investors use both manual investing and Auto Invest, while 11% of all investors use Invest & Access and Auto Invest, but don’t do the “cherry-picking” with manual investing.
The personas
Recently, we’ve done some work to portray Mintos investor personas. The two most popular types identified among our investors are a male in his early thirties and a male in his early fifties, with average savings of EUR 22 000 and EUR 120 000, respectively. Both investor types are well educated and married men, coming mostly from IT, engineering and finance industries, with interests in various outdoor activities, their professional field, and self-development. They invest with Mintos from their urban and suburban homes and spend on average between 10 and 11 minutes per visit to track and manage their outstanding investments of approximately EUR 4 000 and EUR 10 000, respectively.
Women investors on Mintos
We have created these personas as male investors, as more than 80% of investors on Mintos are men. It’s not a secret that men invest more than women, although many types of research show that women are better at investing money. According to research from The Warwick Business School, women earn higher returns and are better savers. It is expected is that the imbalance between male and female investors will continue shrinking with the continued global economic empowerment of women and easier access to financial literacy.
Since the launch of Mintos back in 2015, the trend of women investors joining Mintos has been growing together with the growth of the Mintos marketplace. While in 2018 women made 14.7% of the total new coming investors, in 2019 this percentage has grown to 15.7%. Given the small difference in time of registration and the first investment made, women also prove to be more determined with their investing choices. Women do more research before they start investing in general, and invest less impulsively than men.
On Mintos, Baltic States are dominating the positive trend of women investors. Estonia has the biggest share of women investors on Mintos, represented by 32.7% out of the total number of Estonian investors. Relatively high presence is also noticed with Latvian and Lithuanian women investors: 22.5% and 17.6%, respectively, followed by women investors from Denmark who make 16.2% of all Danish investors on Mintos.
When it comes to age, most women investors on Mintos are found within the age group of 30-34.
The future course
We are both happy and aware that the popularity of investing in loans will continue growing. As the leading global marketplace offering the ease of use, global accessibility and the best diversification opportunities, we will keep on enhancing our marketplace for the best investing experience. We look forward to remaining the go-to marketplace when it comes to investing in loans for individual investors, no matter if they are experienced or just starting – as we have proven to be so far.
