P2P-Banking.com

MyC4 will cancel 105 open and pending loans to borrowers in Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire). This is scheduled to take place next week. Money from the bids will be returned to the lenders. Some lenders are unsatisfied with the situation as the bids in these loans tied up their money for up to 6 weeks without interest.

Announcement from MyC4:

Notre Nation and Ivoire Credit have decided to cancel all open loans currently pending on the MyC4 platform. This is being done for two reasons.  First, both Ivoire Credit and Notre Nation are undergoing significant reorganization and operational changes, to plan for improvements and scaling of operations.  This is putting significant pressure on both organizations and we expect that there might be delay in some payments going forward. Second, there has been a relatively long period since many of these Businesses were uploaded, and the current expected loan disbursement dates. To ensure that the borrowers’ situations have not change would require a new due diligence of each, which current resources don’t allow, given the long list of loans.  Therefore and to protect Investors MYC4 has agreed to return all funds to Investors. This will be done within the next week. If you have money tied up in a Bid to any of these Providers your money will be transferred back into your Account immediately, when the cancellation is done of your specific loan. MYC4 is planning to cancel 105 loans.

MYC4 resume uploading of Businesses from Notre Nation and Ivoire Credit within the coming months, and they will continue to diligently manage the existing portfolio in the interim. If you have more questions please use the Blogs of Notre Nation and Ivoire Credit. We are sorry that your money has been inactive for 4-5 weeks and we apologize.

Source

Kiva has achieved the third place in the American Express Members project vote (see earlier coverage “Kiva celebrates 3rd birthday“) and wins a 300,000 US$ grant. In a “Thank you” post Lyndsey Erikson, Kiva writes:

This grant money will help Kiva to enable $6 million in loans to an additional 12,000 developing world entrepreneurs over the next ten years.

A day after the start of the secondary market (see: “Lending Club allows lenders to trade their investments“) of Lendingclub.com, today 3 loans are offered for sale. I doubt that these Lendingclub loans will find a buyer, since they are all more then 60 days late and the discounts of the asking price versus the outstanding interest and accrued interest are rather small (13.64% to 23.13%). But maybe someone will purchase the first note (it’s only 20 US$) just to experience and test the process.

There have also been reports by lenders, that do not fit the new requirements, but were able to sign up at FolioFn, raising the question if these lenders can buy notes even if they are prohibited from lending themselves.

Prosper.com announced that it is entering a quite period:

Prosper has started a process to register, with the appropriate securities authorities, promissory notes that may be offered and sold to lenders through our site in the future.

The registration filing is a necessary step toward making the secondary lending market available to the community. This is something many of you have been asking for, and we believe the liquidity of a secondary market will make Prosper even more vibrant.

Until we complete the registration process, we will not accept new lender registrations or allow new commitments from existing lenders. If you’re an existing lender, your current lender agreements will be unaffected; your existing loans will continue to be serviced; you’ll be able to track and monitor your loans; and you’ll be able to withdraw funds from your Prosper account.

See Prosper blog announcement. Prosper seems to be copying the route Lendingclub.com already successfully completed.

Further coverage at Prosper Lending Review and Personal Loan Portfolio.

Maneo.jp today launched the first active p2p lending service in Japan. The service connects lenders (aged 20-65) and borrowers (aged 20-60). Maneo verifies the identity, credit grade and the income of potential borrowers (minimum annual income required is approx. 30,000 US$). Borrowers then create a loan listing and set a maximum interest rate. Lenders can bid on the loan through an auction process.

For information about Maneo’s funding see the earlier coverage: “Maneo to introduce p2p lending in Japan”

Lendingclub.com has introduced a secondary market for lenders. This is a major step, because one disadvantage for lenders in p2p lending was the lack of liquidity. Once the money was lend it was tied up (apart from repayments) until the end of the loan term (typically 36 months and more).

Through it’s secondary market - called Note Trading Platform Lendingclub allows lenders to offer their loans (or more precisely notes representing these loans) to other lenders.

Sellers list Notes that they would like to sell and enter an asking price. Buyers browse Notes that are available for sale, review payment history and the evolution of the borrower’s credit score, and buy Notes at the asking price. Buy orders received before 4pm Eastern time will generally settle same day, while buy orders received after 4pm Eastern time will settle next day.

Information about the Notes
Each listing contains the Note’s interest rate, issue date, outstanding principal, accrued interest, number of payments left, payment history to date, and the variation of the credit score of the underlying borrower since the issue date. Note, however, that the Notes are not “re-graded” over time, so you should not rely on grades assigned to Notes at the time they were issued to assess the current risk of a Note.

The Lending Club note trading platform is operated by FolioFn, a registered broker dealer. Foliofn charges to the seller a trading fee equal to 1% of the transaction amount. There is no fee charged to buyers.

Right now there are no notes offered for sale.

As reported in the previous post, Lendingclub.com is open for new lenders. However lenders have to meet two requirements:

Resident in one of 15 approved states:

The Notes are presently being offered and sold solely to residents of the states of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New York, Rhode Island, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, and are not presently being offered or sold to residents of any other state, the District of Columbia, any other territory or possession of the United States, or any foreign country.

Compliance with Financial Suitability Standards and Investment Limits

I confirm that I (a) have an annual gross income of at least $70,000 and a net worth (exclusive of home, home furnishings and automobile) of at least $70,000; or (b) have a net worth (determined with the same exclusions) of at least $250,000. In addition, I agree that I will not purchase notes in an amount in excess of 10% of my net worth, determined exclusive of my home, home furnishings and automobile.

I think Lendingclub probably will be adding more states to the list of approved states over the next months.

P2P lending service Lendingclub.com, which was in a quite period not accepting new lenders and bids from existing lenders, today announced that it completed it’s SEC registration. LendingClub is now resuming it’s full p2p lending service and again accepting new lenders.

See: Lending Club completes $600 million SEC filing

More to follow…

This week the new social lending service Veecus.com launched. Veecus is a peer-to-peer microfinance network. It allows microentrepreneurs from all over the world to access funds to develop their projects. Lenders can select projects, invest and take part in economic development.

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) supply the loan listings and set the interest rates. Currently there are two MFIs active (VSSU and Oasis Microfinance), which list loans in India and Cameroon offering 3% interest rates.

Lenders can bid in multiples of 20 Euro. Currently uploading money is done via Paypal. Credit card payments will become available next week.

Veecus is run by a french limited company, run and owned by the co-founders Clément Carjat and Baptiste Fabre. Veecus will make money from a “volume-based fee paid by microfinance institutions once they
have received funds for microentrepreneurs projects.” as well as a 1 Euro one-time signup-fee from each lender.

The site is available in english and french language (the company blog is in french only). If you have tried Veecus please share your experiences with the community in our Forum.

The concept has similarities to Kiva and MyC4.

Image: One of the current project loan listings.

After several hours speculation following an email sent to some US lenders of Zopa including the statement “In addition, the Zopa social networking Web site will no longer be available as of October 9, 2008″, the Zopa CFO (UK) has posted a clarifing statement on the Zopa discussion board.

The email from Affinity Plus is partially correct in that we are transferring our customers relationships to the credit union they either borrowed from or bought a CD from (invested in). We are NOT shutting the website today. As most of you know, Zopa’s US operation has a very different model to that in the UK and Italy in that it works in partnership with financial institutions (the credit unions) rather than being a pure peer to peer marketplace as it is here and in Italy. So while our model is doing very well in current market conditions, the US has been adversely affected in a way that couldn’t have been predicted when we launched and is no way the fault of our partners. For me, a real shame is that we weren’t able to launch the original model over there for regulatory reasons, esp given what a great job the regulators have turned out to have been doing there over the last few years, but that is another story….

The decision has not been taken lightly, and has obviously been difficult for our US colleagues, but due to the current credit crisis we have decided to withdraw from the US marketplace. This decision will have no impact on Zopa’s other activities in the UK, Italy and Asia. Zopa’s UK operation has experienced significant volume increases in 2008 with huge growth in new members and increasing lender returns, while continuing to maintain excellent credit quality – currently less than 0.5% of loans are affected by any kind of late payment issue, with actual losses below 0.04%. Zopa Italy has achieved the highest growth of any European peer-to-peer operation since its launch in January, and has recently launched the first secondary market for any peer-to-peer operation.

Zopa’s US customers’ deposit accounts continue to be insured by the NCUA up to $250,000, and servicing of those accounts as well as the loans will be assumed by the credit unions within 90 days.
…

The US website does not appear to have any statement regarding the changes.
Update: There is a blog entry on the Zopa blog now.