Mintos exchanges rouble to euros for investors
Mintos investors who had available funds in the Russian rouble (RUB) are now receiving partial RUB amounts exchanged to euros (EUR).
The European lending marketplace said this was after one of the banks which services RUB funds for Mintos decided to liquidate its RUB position, exchanging all RUB to EUR in a “bid-ask spread trade” on the bank currency market.
Mintos said it will inform investors about the possible ways to exchange the currency when it comes to the remaining funds available in RUB and the upcoming repayments in RUB.
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“This will be done either by enabling exchange on the platform or in cooperation with other service providers,” the platform said a blog post on its website yesterday.
“We will update you once there’s more clarity on the extent of sanctions for Russia and their implications on the European banks.”
Mintos said the Kazakhstani Tenge (KZT) exchange was temporarily open on the platform and it will continue managing the access to the currency exchange for KZT based on availability of services for the exchange and currency fluctuation risks.
The platform said repayments from Russian lending companies have started to be impacted.
Until Friday 25 February, repayments were being processed usual schedules and without interruption, and yesterday the platform said it reached out to lending companies in Russia whose settlements were supposed to be transferred to Mintos investors.
The lending companies told the platform that while they are not seeing disruptions in borrowers’ discipline, the transfer processes from their Russian accounts are already disrupted, and they have not been able to transfer settlement payments to Mintos accounts with European banks.
The platform will check the status daily and keep lenders informed of any changes, Mintos added.
Mintos has previously said it was limiting investor loan exposure to Belarus and is exploring alternatives to the SWIFT international payments system so that Russian loan originators can resume making repayments.
Mintos said at the time of writing its update yesterday, there was still no new information about which Russian banks will be disconnected from the SWIFT system.
“As we stated before, Mintos will share more about decisions on how we will approach alternatives to repayments from Russia when the final list of sanctioned banks is known,” the platform added.
Last week, Mintos removed loans from Russian and Ukrainian lending companies from its conservative strategy before excluding all loans from both nations from the its primary market.