When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, one of the less visible casualties was a corner of European retail finance: peer-to-peer lending. Many investors who had lent money through online marketplaces suddenly found loans tied to Russian and Ukrainian borrowers frozen, delayed or in limbo. Four years later, a new crisis at Europe's largest platform has sent many of them looking for Mintos alternatives, and the lessons of 2022 explain where that money is going.
A market built on Eastern European lenders
European P2P lending grew quickly in the 2010s, particularly from the Baltic states. Platforms such as Mintos, based in Riga, Latvia, let retail investors buy small slices of loans issued by lending companies across dozens of countries. Many of those lenders operated in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space, where consumer credit offered high interest rates and the platforms could pass on returns of 10% or more.
That geographic concentration became a direct exposure when the war began. Sanctions cut payment channels with Russia. In Ukraine, borrowers and lenders faced a war economy, mass displacement and disrupted banking. Platforms had to decide, almost overnight, how to handle loan books that could no longer be serviced normally.
What happened to the money
The outcomes varied sharply, and that variation is the most useful part of the story.
Loans tied to Russian lenders largely became stuck. Sanctions made it difficult or impossible to move money out, and investors on several platforms saw those balances sit in recovery for years.
Ukrainian exposure played out differently in at least one widely watched case. PeerBerry, a platform whose lending group operated in Ukraine, had roughly €51 million of loans tied to Ukraine and Russia when the war began. Rather than writing them off, the group kept repaying in instalments and completed full repayment, with interest, by December 2024. For many investors, it became the clearest example of a lending business honouring obligations under extreme pressure.
The difference was not luck. It came down to who stood behind the loans, whether money could physically move, and whether the lending group chose to keep paying.
The 2026 shock at Mintos
This year brought a different kind of stress, unrelated to the war. Mintos investors had put more than €61 million into notes backed by Nera Capital, an Irish company that lends to U.K. law firms handling consumer claims. Since late March 2026, interest payments have been delayed after the U.K.'s Solicitors Regulation Authority began reviewing those firms. A principal payment due in May was missed, and by August industry trackers estimated that close to 29% of the platform's whole portfolio, including older cases, sat in recovery.
Investors who tried to sell their positions early reportedly found no buyers even at a 30% discount. Mintos remains a licensed investment firm and continues to operate, but for many users the episode recalled 2022: once again, money they believed was spread across many borrowers depended on a single chain of companies.
Where investors are moving
Few experienced investors are leaving P2P lending altogether. Instead, they are spreading money more deliberately, using the lessons of the war years:
- Geography matters. Investors now check where borrowers actually are and whether money can flow out of that country under sanctions or emergency rules.
- The lender behind the loan matters more than the platform. A buyback guarantee is only as strong as the company giving it, as 2022 showed.
- Regulation is a floor, not a shield. EU licensing protects investors if a platform itself fails, but not against bad loans.
- Liquidity is conditional. Secondary markets dry up exactly when everyone wants to sell. In practice, that has meant smaller allocations spread across several platforms, more interest in business and real-estate-backed lending, and closer attention to platforms that can document how they handled past defaults.
A lesson beyond lending
For Ukrainians, the war's financial shocks have been far heavier than frozen investment accounts. But the P2P episode illustrates something broader about how financial risk travels in wartime. Exposure that looks remote on a spreadsheet, a lending company in another country or a payment route through a sanctioned bank, can turn into real losses within days.
It also shows that some businesses kept their promises under the hardest possible conditions. Ukrainian lenders that continued repaying investors through the war did more than protect their reputations. They demonstrated that a functioning credit market can survive extraordinary pressure, a point that will matter as Ukraine rebuilds and seeks private investment.
What to take from it
Europe's P2P lending market has now been tested by a pandemic, a war and a regulatory shock in the U.K. Each crisis rewarded the same habits: know who borrows the money, know who stands behind the loans, and never assume an exit will be there when you need it. For investors reassessing their options in 2026, those habits matter more than any advertised rate.