The Impact of Currency Risk and Loan Originator Creditworthiness on Cross-Border P2P Lending Rates on Mintos

This study investigates the effects of loan originator creditworthiness (proxied by the Mintos risk score) and exchange rate volatility on the interest rates of cross-border peer-to-peer (P2P) loans on Mintos, the largest Euro-denominated P2P lending platform. The paper uses a dataset of 727,812 loans originated in eight countries over the period of 2022 to 2024, to perform a multiple regression. The findings suggest that loan originator creditworthiness has an economically significant negative effect on the expected lending rates on the platform. In addition to this, findings suggest that exchange rate volatility between the lender and borrower country has an economically significant positive effect on the expected lending rates on the platform. Among the several broader factors investigated in the paper, macroeconomic factors explain the majority of the variance in cross-border P2P loan interest rates. Robustness checks—including year-by-year, country-by-country, and median regression analyses—confirm the stability of these relationships. This study contributes to existing literature by further affirming the importance of borrower creditworthiness on the pricing of P2P loans and offering novel empirical evidence on the effect of exchange rate volatility in the pricing of cross-border P2P loan rates.