P2P-Banking.com

Lenders at MyC4.com do not have an easy task, when trying to check which of their loans are late on the repayments. The account page does not offer a comprehensive overview page. If a lender really wanted to check in detail he has to click through to the detail page of each loan he invested into.

Officially only one loan has the status ‘defaulted’ so far. However MyC4 so far has no standard policy when a late loan is to be declared defaulted. MyC4 has stated that there will be a default policy by the end of August.

Researching the situation, there are more than 320 loans that are late (fully or partly) with at least one repayment. Of these 72 loans are 3 payments late, 64 loans are 4 payments late, 30 are 5 payments late and 22 are 6 or more payments late.

Another issue that raised some concerns are the first impacts of the changed rules regarding currency risks.

… as some of you might have noticed already the first repayments are now posted on the investors accounts from Kenian investments where we investors are now taking the risk of currency fluctuations.

Within the first period from disbursement to the first repayment the KES has devalued from 97 to 104.5 = 7.2% already. … (Source: see discussion here)

To help lenders selecting loans to invest in, a column with the information whether a loan open for bidding is issued in local currency or in Euro was added to the wiseclerk MyC4 statistic pages.

(Source: uses information from Status der … MyC4 Kredite)

Monetto.pl, one of the three p2p lending services active in Poland has financed 1450 loans applications resulting in 440 loans totaling 1 million Zloty (approx 0.5 million US$) in 4 months. The average loan amount is 2300 Zloty. The service claims 8000 registered users and a repayment rate of 97% so far (which is said to be a good result).

Borrowers are usually aged 35 to 50, and live in rural areas or small cities. Lenders on the other hand are typically aged 25 to 30 and live in the major cities.

Monetto plans to introduce new features, including guarantees for lenders.

Lucas Banach, CEO of Prender the company that runs Monetto, says that cooperations with e-commerce sites (e.g. Kupujemy.pl) are essential for the growth of Monetto.pl.

Competitor Kokos.pl claims 13000 registered users and 1.2 million Zloty loans on its website. Kokos launched 5 months ago.

(Sources 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Lending Hub - an australian p2p lending site, which says it will launch in August or September 2008, has set an ambiguous aim: processing borrowing and lending applications in real time.

The Lending Hub system will check and process a borrowing application within less than a minute (assuming you have a traceable credit history and have provided all required information). Now instead of waiting at a bank or searching for your nearest branch we’ll be able to process your details in less time than it takes to grab a coffee!

If we require any physical documents (e.g. payslips or bank account statements) you can upload a scan directly to your Lending Hub account. No need to mail us anything (unless you really want to of course).

As do most p2p lending services, Lending Hub will not charge a fee for early repayment of loans, which it says is an advantage over most other lending services in Australia.

Lendinghub will be regulated under the Uniform Consumer Credit Code legislation.

You can also read a guest article by Ivan Martelli, Director of Lending Hub

PeerFX.com a p2p currency exchange that wants do to away with high margins and fees banks charge when exchanging currencies, announced to launch on August, 1st. Users will be able to change US and Canadian Dollars directly (USD, CAD).
Watch a video of the funding. The founders Robert Dunlop and Florence Leung gave away a 51% percent stake of the company for 250,000 CAN$ seed funding.

Personally, I am not convinced by the business model. For consumers there are less and less needs to actually exchange currencies in advance. You can nearly always pay with plastic. In Europe the realm of the Euro is expanding. And several European banks allow their account holders to withdraw cash from any ATM (of any bank) worldwide fee-free.
But maybe the situation is different between the US and Canada. What is your opinion on this, dear reader?

Apparently Peermint.com has participated in the New Ventures BC competition.
The deadline for round 3 is August, 13th.

First prize is 60,000 CAN$ in cash plus 100,000 CAN$ proof of concept award.

Update: Peermint made round 2 but is not among the 30 startups in round 3

Lendingclub.com has in a new release some new account management features for lenders.
Lendingclub is currently not open for registration of new lenders.

Accenture in cooperation with Gemius published a report (english, polish page) on the polish p2p lending market. The report looks at the parameters of the polish p2p lending sites Kokos (see our earlier interview with Kokos), Finansowo and Monetto. The report in detail shows the result of a survey of 1075 internet users on questions of various social lending aspects.

via thebankwatch.com