The Pursuit of Scrappiness #30 - Martins Sulte 🇱🇻 (Mintos) on building Europe’s largest loan marketplace, pre-requisites of successful crowdfunding and road to becoming a licensed investment firm
Martins Sulte is the co-founder and CEO of Mintos marketplace. Mintos is the leading loan investment platform in continental Europe with more than 7bn EUR of loans funded. Recently Mintos ran a successful crowdfunding campaign, netting around 7mEUR from its community. On top of that, they have just announced receiving an investment broker license from Latvian finance watchdog FKTK.
In this episode, we talk about the evolution of the Mintos product and the P2P lending/loan investment platform industry as such. We also cover what it takes to run a successful crowdfunding campaign. Finally, we talk about the Mintos achievement of securing an investment broker license and the state and outlook of the Latvian financial services market
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[02:20] - INTRODUCTION AND THE ORIGINS OF MINTOS
[06:00] - ON MINTOS PRODUCT AND THE P2P LENDING INDUSTRY
- The chicken and egg problem of supply/demand for a marketplace
- Growth opportunities within the industry
- The majority of people in Europe are not investing as a whole
- Building a great product as the main customer acquisition tool
- The evolution of the P2P lending industry
- Education of the retail investor base
- The role of crypto in the lending and investing markets
[26:00] - ON CROWDFUNDING AS AN ALTERNATIVE FUNDING METHOD
- Considerations for choosing crowdfunding as a fundraising method
- Structuring a crowdfund
- Pre-requisites for successful crowdfunding
- Liquidity of crowdfunding investments
- VC investment environment in European Fintech
- Secondary markets for crowdfunding investors
- Impact on the company of publicly traded “private shares”
[39:25] - ON GETTING INVESTMENT BROKER LICENCE AND THE LATVIAN FINANCIAL MARKET OUTLOOK
- The regulatory status of P2P lending over the years
- Considerations for obtaining an investment broker license
- Peculiarities of working with the Latvian regulator
- PR of the national financial sector
- Evolution of the fintech and general tech space in Latvia
- Availability of talent
- Promising areas of Fintech
- What’s next for Mintos
To reach out to Martins use:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinssulte/
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
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Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/