P2P-Banking.com

When I decided to withdraw some money from my Kiva account, I was informed:

This email confirms your withdrawal request of $25.00. You can expect the funds to be deposited into your paypal account within 1-3 weeks.

This astonished me. The withdrawal is conducted via paypal (as is the upload). The upload was almost instantly. Therefore I did not expect the withdrawal to take weeks.

BTW: So far my Kiva loans all pay on time.

Short news update on Prosper.com developments:

• Changes at the Prosper management team: John Witchel (former CTO) and Tom Pigoski are no longer listed as part of the management team. A comment on this blog post indicates that John Witchel has left the company while Tom Pigoski is on family leave. Chris Denend is now CTO.
• Prosper says it will enable faster listings for qualified borrowers. In a streamlined process some borrowers may post loan listings without adding a title, description or picture.
• Reading statistics published by Prosper? Have a good look on the definitions! In the market survey results, published on Aug. 12th, it looks like on some parameters the year to date figures for 2008 are rising compared to 2007. However looking in the definitions, Prosper compares 7 months in 2008 to 6 months in 2007. (quote:
  2008 Year-to-Date: January 1, 2008 through July 31, 2008.
  2007 Year-to-Date: January 1, 2007 through June 30, 2007.)

German p2p lending service Smava has sent its lenders an email asking them to produce short videos telling their personal experiences using Smava. Smava offers 50 Euro (approx. 75 US$) for each user generated video that is sent to Smava and published.

Three (older) videos by Smava lenders can be viewed here.

Zopa UK has raised fees for new lenders to 1% (annual of capital outstanding). Old lenders continue to be served at the 0.5% fee.

MyC4.com will start to offer loans in Rwanda next week. This is the fourth country MyC4 is lending at, after Uganda, Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire. Mads Kjaer, CEO of MyC4, is quoted that Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal and South Africa will follow. In 2009 he aims to serve borrowers in 20 countries in Africa. (Source)

In a danish television video (15 min, danish language), which was broadcastes yesterday, MyC4 is presented as a good alternative for investing and gains a recommendation of MyBanker.dk, a website comparing banks.

Maneo.jp aims to be the first active p2p lending service in Japan. Their mission statement (from a press release):

maneo Inc. plans to offer a user friendly and highly secure online community for people to borrow and lend money through an online auction system. maneo is about helping people lend and borrow money with each other, sidestepping the expense and inconvenience of traditional banks and consumer finance companies. People who want to borrow money register with maneo and create loan listings. Potential lenders register with maneo and bid on the loan listings they are interested in. maneo aggregates the bids with the lowest rates to fund the relevent loans and handles all of the administrative matters relating to the loans

Maneo received venture capital from J-Seed Ventures Inc. and Yasuda Enterprise Development Co., Ltd. The last funding round was in April 2008 for 80 million Yen (approx. 0.75 million US$). The first funding round was in April 2007.

The company website currently says “Coming in Summer 2008″. Zopa and Prosper also have announced plans for Japan, but no launch date has been set so far.

(Sources/further reading: 1, 2, 3 - all in japanese)

Following through on the announcement (read: Zopa UK plans Young Market to target young borrower) Zopa has launched this market segment. Zopa says, it will help young adults, aged 20 to 25 obtain a loan, which otherwise would have difficulties - not because they have a bad credit history but because they have little or no credit history.

Zopa lenders can choose to make offers to these young applicants, with the added attraction of being able to charge a higher rate of interest because of the higher risk that these as yet unproven younger borrowers represent. So whereas the safest borrowers coming to Zopa can typically get a 5000 GBP loan over 3 years at around 8.5%, Young Market borrowers will be able to get the same loan at around 12.5%.