P2P-Banking.com

In early summer 2010 Yes-secure.com launched the second p2p lending service active in the UK. Dr. Chandra Patni, CEO of Yes-secure answers my questions.

P2P-Banking.com: Dr. Chandra Patni, please tell us about the background of the Yes-secure management team and what lead to entering the p2p lending market?

Dr. Chandra Patni: I came up with the business opportunity in 2008, having reviewed Zopa I felt that a social networking based person to person lending marketplace site could become a successful alternative to Zopa. I realised there were opportunities to build and complement the social lending market. Consumers need choice. YES-secure.com allows person-to-person lending alongside social networking as people want to know who they are lending to.

P2P-Banking.com: How is Yes-secure funded?

Dr. Chandra Patni: YES-secure.com is funded by private investors alongside the directors of the company.

P2P-Banking.com: What benefits does Yes-secure offer to lenders and borrowers?

Dr. Chandra Patni: Lenders: YES-secure.com provides UK savers and investors a new way to beat inflation and earn better returns than by investing their savings in fixed deposits in a bank. Along with the introductory offers and waivers, there are a wide range of markets (A*- E) allowing lenders to manipulate their investment across various markets getting them high, assured and steady returns. Debit card verification upon registration, stringent underwriting procedures and assigning markets in keeping with the borrowers’ creditworthiness make YES-secure a safe investment destination. Additionally, YES-secure offers a secure means of social network based lending and borrowing implying lower default rates and higher returns for lenders.

Borrowers: Borrowers can get competitive rates from real people. They simply describe how much they are looking to borrow, over what period, and the maximum interest rate they are willing to pay. Then they can simply sit back and watch people bidding to lend to them. Once they find a rate they like, they can accept it and get the money paid straight into their bank account. More traditional methods of personal loan approval rarely take personal information (such as connections, personality, and general circumstances) into account and are approved or declined based solely on credit history and financial circumstances. YES-secure combine both the important credit background as well as pertinent personal information on each borrower. Read the rest of this entry »

In the UK Zopa expects a record month of new p2p loans funded. CEO Giles Andrews told P2P-Banking.com today: “We are going through some dramatic growth at the moment. July was a record month with 908 loans for 4.5 million GBP, but we should do 1100 for 5.5 million GBP in August.”

A few days ago Finnish p2p lending site Fixura launched. The bilingual (Finnish & Swedish) site already lists over a hundred loan requests.

CEO Simon Sandvik told P2P-Banking.com:

This social lending company differs from the ’standard’ ones as it does not provide lending auctions. Instead, the borrower sets his/her own interest rate, amount (1, 000 – 10,000 EUR) and duration of the loan. Then a Finnish credit scoring company processes the data and the borrower gets a one-to-five star rating. If a borrower is marked for payment issues in the past, the loan request automatically gets rejected.

… investors can also diversify their investments through different loans in 100 EUR lots. …

The company operates totally free of paper as it uses the local banks’ identification systems, a kind of e-signature. The investors can invest directly online and the borrowers can sign their contracts.

If a loan does not get fully funded the borrower can choose after 14 days from the first investment to accept a part of it, or reject it as he or she sees fit.

Currently investors pay 4 Euro for each withdrawal. Fees for borrowers are

• 5% origination fee
• 2% annual fee
• 4 Euro per transaction

Compared to other p2p lending services these fees are rather high.

Visualizations are great to show data that would otherwise just be a long list. I decided to create a map of the p2p lending landscape in Europe. It shows active and discontinued p2p lending services in Europe (including p2p microfinance). Not listed are sites that are in pre-launch stage. All of these marketplaces have been featured earlier in the P2P-Banking.com blog. If you want more information about any of them just enter the name in the search box on the top right of this blog.

Notice to other websites: You are free to copy and use this map, provided you agree not to alter or resize the image and you will set a link to this article.

Notice to p2p lending sites: If you want to be included in a future version of this map, contact me to learn how.

Funding Circle has launched it’s peer to company lending service in Britain. As reported by P2P-Banking.com in February the startup received 1.1 million US$. Any UK resident can lend either by individually selecting businesses or by using the autobid feature and spreading the investment over several matching businesses. While loans last for 1 to 3 years FundingCircle – unlike other p2p lending sites – allows lenders to access their money easily: Selling of parts of loans funded to other lenders is possible (secondary market).

In 2010 lenders are not charged any fees to use Funding Circle (in 2011 there will be a 1% annual servicing fee and a 1% sales fee).

All businesses applying for loans are screened by Funding Circle’s underwriters using data supplied by Experian to ensure they are creditworthy. A business may apply for a Funding Circle loan amount between 5,000 and 50,000 GBP. Read the rest of this entry »

In Switzerland P2P Lending Service Cashare announced that it plans to be one of the web service pioneering the use of SuisseID a digital signature. Documents signed with this digital signature are as binding as a conventional signature on paper.

Opportunities for P2P Lending

Several European countries (e.g. Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium) have enacted laws that equate digital signatures with conventional signatures.

P2P Lending can use digital signatures to

• validate the identity (and depending on the signature card the address) of users
• automate processes that otherwise would require a signature on paper and enable paperless process chains.

Guest article, by Julia Kurnia, Director Zidisha Inc.

Entrepreneurs in low-income countries often face a dilemma: their business activities don’t earn enough to support their families, but they lack the investment capital needed to make the businesses more profitable. Restrictive political and economic conditions and geographic remoteness make it expensive for local banks to lend to small business owners. Some of these borrowers are serviced by microfinance institutions, but individual business expansion loans often carry prohibitive collateral and interest requirements due to microfinance institutions’ high administrative costs. So the businesses don’t grow, and the families they support remain impoverished.

Charitable microlending platforms such as Kiva.org and MyC4.com aim to improve disadvantaged entrepreneurs’ access to capital by providing platforms for microfinance institutions to raise subsidized loans directly from web users in wealthy countries, on the assumption that the high cost of financial services in developing countries is due to the organizations’ limited access to affordable lending capital. Yet this solution does not address another crucial barrier to affordable financial services for small business owners in developing countries: the high cost-to-revenue ratio inherent in small loans offered in marginalized geographic areas. The average Kiva field partner institution must charge borrowers more than 30% interest on loans financed at zero interest by Kiva lenders. Even at these rates, most microfinance institutions simply cannot afford to extend services to the remote rural areas where access to financial services makes the greatest impact on people’s opportunities for economic advancement.

It is generally assumed that such high interest rates are a necessary cost of lending to entrepreneurs in isolated and impoverished areas. In the classic microfinance model championed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus in the 1970s, loan officers go on the road to collect repayments in person from borrowers, who are required to attend training sessions and participate in compulsory savings exercises in order to ensure responsible conduct. Even today, most local microfinance institutions which raise capital from Kiva or MyC4 are based along this model, with loan officers visiting borrowers at their businesses and communicating with lenders on their behalf. It is assumed that the borrowers not only lack the necessary computer skills to communicate with lenders themselves, but also that they cannot be trusted to repay loans, as residents of wealthy countries do, without constant visits by loan officers.

Zidisha.org is a nonprofit microlending platform that operates on very different assumptions. First of all, there are no local intermediaries: instead, the entrepreneurs themselves post loan applications on the website and communicate directly with lenders via Facebook-style profile pages as their business investments grow. To make this possible, Zidisha taps into the growing population of computer-literate, but still economically disadvantaged, small business owners and explosive growth of internet access that have transformed developing countries in recent years. Borrowers access the Zidisha website from cheap cybercafés, old laptops donated to local charities and schools, and even the internet-capable smart phones which have begun to proliferate in even the poorest locations, often with one handset being shared by an entire village. Current Zidisha borrowers assist new applicants with navigating the website, and enlist the help of younger tech-savvy relatives when needed. New client orientations and technical assistance is also provided by Zidisha’s Client Relationship Managers, young adults from the United States and Europe who relocate to the borrowers’ countries and liaise with borrowers on a volunteer basis. Read the rest of this entry »

The global recession or what has come to be known as the ‘great recession’ –in direct reference to the 1930s era Great Depression-has been with us unbelievably for the last 3 and a half years. It doesn’t seem like it does it? Many had predicted that it would turn out to be a ‘W’ or maybe a ‘U shaped or even a ‘double dip’ recovery by now, with most commentators assuming that we would most likely have seen its tail end with a year or two. Most- if not all of them- have been proved embarrassingly wrong! Countries such as the UK, US, Spain, Ireland, Hungary, Portugal –the list goes one and on and on and on- are still counting the cost of the recession in terms of lost jobs, productivity and in some cases, sovereign default! Recovery it seems, whatever alphabet sounds sexy, W or U shaped –is still yet to be seen in many cases.

Looking at the effects of the recession from the microfinance industry perspective however is what makes very interesting reading. Microfinance as such, is an industry that is curiously not correlated directly to the mainstream financial markets. Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished reading Bank 2.0 by Brett King. If I would work in middle-management of a bank – any bank – then I would be scared now, because the book clearly shows that banks are changing to slow. Or they simply deny that the world around them is evolving faster and faster and still try to continue business as it used to be.

Banks still spend too much time trying to solve the wrong questions like how to design branches or think about channel distribution. What they need to understand is that a customized solution fitted to the needs the customer has right now is needed.

If bank management does not foster innovations quickly they will lose contact to the customer. Banking function will continue but the interface to the customers might in future be held by p2p payment providers, p2p lending services, telcos, aggregators or other non-banking “insurgents”.

The book is filled with ample examples and observations from the authors work experience in banking. Available at Amazon US, Amazon UK and Amazon DE.

Fairplace.com.br recently launched the first p2p lending service in Brazil. With approx. 190 million inhabitants Brazil could prove an interesting market for peer to peer lending. While financial institutions are the most common source for loans, consumers face lots of paperwork and high interest.

Founder Eldes Matiuzzo knows that, for he worked 14 years for Unibanco. He says user response since the launch is promising with about 25 registrations per day.

Each loan application undergoes risk assessment (Fairplace uses Seresa Experian Data) and only about 20 percent of applications are approved.

Loan requests are listed for a 14 day auction. Borrowers pay fees only if the loan is successfully funded. Fees listed are 5% for one year loans and 8 percent for two year loans. There are additional fees for credit assessment and each repayment installment. Lenders are charged 2% of each repayment (repaid principal + interest).

Currently the average interest rate at Fairplace is 2.99 percent per month, which is much lower than the average for the Brazilian market.