P2P-Banking.com

Consultancy Gartner predicts that: "By 2010, social-banking platforms will have captured 10% of the available market for retail lending and financial planning". Not surprisingly Zopa is happy about that forecast. I think this is an over-optimistic outlook but James Gardner of BankerVision (working at Lloyds TSB bank) who also thinks it is aggressive points to the example of Paypal, which has been underestimated years ago. A more supportive view comes from Antony Mayfield while taking Zopa as example.

Today another selection of interesting articles on p2p lending was compiled. A highlight is Dough Roller's comparison between Prosper and Lending Club explaining the differences in determining interest rates for loans.

Created by Jean-Christope Capelli

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Prosper.com recently changed it's portofolio plan segment criteria and the bidding guidance. A longtime lender speculates in an analysis that the changes were necessary due to rising default rates.

Yesterday a collection of interesting articles was compiled at BripBlap: (more…)

British Zopa.com just published a spreadsheet with Zopa default rate figures. The weighted average of overall defaults is a tiny 0.1% ! Even more interesting all defaulted cases happened in 2005 or the first half of 2006.

Another interesting read is this case study on Zopa (published late 2006).

Following up on my earlier post regarding the LendingClub launch read Colin Henderson's view on this. Furthermore in this blog it says (without giving sources):

For the moment, the site is only accessible through Facebook, but will eventually be available to the public.

Ireloans.com has announced that it will offer p2p lending in Ireland. (Source: barcampBank)

Other services still in prelaunch phase include CommunityLend.com in Canada and One2Money.de in Germany (Source: Springwise.com)

Today, Lendingclub.com launched offering a p2p lending service to Facebook members. Members can request loans between $1000 and $25000. Other facebook members can the lend the money to the borrower. While technically not arranging loans between freinds like CircleLending, Lendingclub makes uses of the social network and the trust that users have into it. Lendingclub combines aspects from other p2p lending sites like Prosper.com and Zopa.com.

Comparing it to Prosper:

• Lendingclub requires higher credit score as threshold for borrowers to apply (640 compared to Prosper's 520)
• Lendingclub suggests an interest rate based on the borrowers credit grade rather than letting the borrower set an interest rate.
• There are groups like at Prosper

Lendingclub uses what it calls "LendingMatch" to automatically match parties on shared connection it finds. Lenders can additionally manually select and search loans.

The founders of Lendingclub, one of them has a background at Mastercard, raised $2 million in angel funding (source: VentureBeat). 

Using an existing social network gives Lendingclub a great marketing advantage over competitor Prosper.com, which had to build its memberbase starting from zero.

The Dutch site Frooble.nl, which was announced to start as competition for Boober.nl, was in public beta mode for only a few days before it was closed to the public by the founders who cited technical problems and said they hope to launch again in September after solving these.

In his blog, John Witchel, CTO of Prosper.com, describes the current situation regarding the sale of defaulted loans. This offers an insight look at the problems and the future plannings. Check the comments, too.