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Three Baltic platforms - Mintos, Bondora and Twino - filed for new licenses within the same 13 months. Every platform that made this move before killed its P2P product. |
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One Number
None of the three platforms - Zopa (UK, 2020), LendingClub (US, 2021) and RateSetter (UK, 2020) - kept their P2P product after completing a bank-charter transition. Compiled from company transition outcomes These were not marginal experiments. Zopa launched the world's first P2P lending company in 2005. LendingClub was, at its peak, the largest P2P platform globally. Neither inventing the category nor being the biggest name in it save the original product. |
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One Argument P2P lending was never a permanent category. It was a waiting room, and the platforms are now showing what they were waiting for.For over a decade, “peer-to-peer” meant something specific. Retail investors had the opportunity to fund loans directly, platforms took a fee for matching and servicing, and no balance sheet stood behind the credit risk. Except, of course, the investor’s own. In February 2026, Mintos filed to pursue a full ECB license aiming at deposit-based funding, deposit protection, and direct access to central bank liquidity. Bondora had already filed for a banking license in 2025. Twino added a MiCA (the EU crypto framework) license to its existing investment-firm status in June 2026. Three platforms and one shared conclusion: the pure P2P structure had a ceiling. What changed is the cost of capital and the cost of trust. Marketplace investor funding is pricier than insured deposits and can vanish overnight. Deposits, on the other hand, are cheap and sticky. However, deposit protection is not just a growth feature any longer after close to 20 loan originators listed on Mintos failed in 2020 alone. It is becoming the only way to stop a retail investor from asking about the platform’s own solvency. Mintos frames this differently saying that its goal is to combine a bank’s trust and stability with an investment platform’s flexibility. This means keeping the P2P product and building a bank around it, not replacing one with the other. That is the possibility its predecessors did not have at this scale. But scale was not why the earlier three discontinued their P2P products. Zopa said that regulatory and compliance costs would have forced it to cut investor returns to unattractive levels. LendingClub called keeping its retail notes program “not economically practical” once bank rules applied. Those are structural cost problems, not scale problems.
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One Position If you hold P2P exposure through one of these platforms, treat the news about their license applications as a countdown clock on that specific product, not a safety upgrade. I may be wrong if Mintos, Bondora, or Twino actually deliver the hybrid model none of their predecessors managed. However, this is something worth watching, not worth assuming. Has your own company ever changed its business model in a way your stakeholders only found out about after the fact? |
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