Mintos commission-free ETF trading launched this week, giving the Latvian fintech’s 500,000 European users access to more than 1,000 exchange-traded funds with no transaction fees, no custody charge, and a minimum investment of just €1.
The move marks a meaningful expansion for a platform that started life as a peer-to-peer lending marketplace in 2015, later adding bonds, real estate and a cash management account before pivoting toward becoming a multi-asset investment platform.
What Mintos Commission-Free ETF Trading Actually Costs
The fee structure is simpler than most rivals. Mintos charges nothing to buy, sell or hold an ETF. The only cost to an investor is the fund’s own ongoing charge, which is set by the provider.
To put that in context: a flat €1 execution fee on a €20 order, common on other platforms, works out to a 5% cost before a position has moved at all. Mintos eliminates that entirely.
The catalogue covers more than 1,000 UCITS-compliant ETFs (funds meeting EU diversification and transparency rules designed for retail investors) from providers including iShares, VanEck and Vanguard. Investors can either pick and trade individual funds or use Mintos Core ETFs, a pre-built portfolio of equity and fixed-income funds that rebalances automatically, with no management or custody fee and a minimum of €50.
‘We wanted to remove every barrier between an investor and their first ETF,’ said Martins Sulte, Mintos co-founder and chief executive.
One protection worth noting: the Mintos investor compensation scheme, established under EU Directive 97/9/EC, limits compensation to the platform’s outstanding liabilities towards an investor, capped at €20,000. That is the same ceiling that applies across most EU investment firm compensation schemes, not a figure unique to Mintos.
Upvest Powers the Plumbing, and It Has Backing to Match
The ETF catalogue runs on infrastructure built by Upvest, a Berlin-based investment infrastructure firm that recently raised $125 million in a new funding round valuing it at €640 million, up from €360 million when it last raised money in December 2024. The round was led by Sapphire Ventures and Tencent, with $90 million in equity and the remainder structured separately.
Upvest processed over 100 million annual orders for more than 30 financial institutions, with volumes growing at a double-digit monthly rate, according to the company. Its client roster also includes Santander’s Openbank, Revolut, N26 and DKB. CMC Markets partnered with Upvest to launch stocks, ETFs and mutual funds in Germany ahead of a wider European rollout.
Upvest plans to use the new capital to roll out localised pension products, including Germany’s Altersvorsorgedepot and UK Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs), meaning the infrastructure that now powers Mintos’s ETF offering may eventually underpin SIPP-eligible products on other platforms too.
Where Mintos Sits in the Neobroker Race
The competitive picture is crowded. Scalable Capital, the German neobroker focused on recurring ETF plans, charges €2.99 a month for its premium tier. XTB recently redesigned its own Investment Plans feature, letting users combine ETFs and individual stocks in the same recurring plan. Mintos has previewed a similar feature under the same name, but has given no launch date.
Trade Republic, the largest player in this segment, has grown to more than 8 million users and over €100 billion in assets. Mintos is coming from a different direction: where neobanks such as N26 added investing as a layer on top of banking in 2024, Mintos is a lending and bond marketplace bolting ETFs onto an investment platform that already exists.
The market Mintos is entering has been growing fast. European-listed ETFs recorded full-year 2025 net inflows of US$396.84 billion, driving total European ETF industry assets to an all-time high of US$3.22 trillion at the end of December 2025, according to ETFGI’s own press release. Mintos cited ETFGI data in its announcement as €330 billion (approximately $377 billion); ETFGI’s published figure is higher at US$396.84 billion, and the difference likely reflects currency conversion timing or a different data cut. The direction of travel is the same either way.
Mintos also pointed to Vanguard projections that the number of European ETF investors will rise from 30 million today to 100 million by 2035.
Away from the ETF launch, Latvian public broadcaster LSM reported in early 2026 that Mintos had begun procedures to obtain a full banking licence, with the company estimating it could receive one within 12 months. Mintos is already supervised by Latvijas Banka, the central bank of Latvia, under its existing investment firm and electronic money institution licence. A banking licence would allow it to offer deposit products directly, which would put it in more direct competition with the neobanks it currently sits alongside rather than behind.
For existing Mintos users, the ETF rollout requires no new account. The Investment Plans automation feature, which would allow weekly, fortnightly, monthly or quarterly top-ups, is still in development with no confirmed date.
