P2P-Banking.com

Loanland.se is the first Swedish p2p lending service. Founder Daniel Kaplan, who in 2006 headed the successful sale of Swedish auction site Tradera to Ebay for 48 million US$, sees a great potential for peer to peer lending in Sweden.

At Loanland, borrowers with the best credit grade can borrow up to 300,000 SEK (approx 45,000 US$), while borrowers with the lowest admitted credit grade can borrow up to 3,000 SEK (approx 450 US$). But borrowers are able to achieve a better credit rating by paying back on time and then can later borrow a larger amount, says Kaplan.

As of today the site had 4 loan listings with interest rates between 4 and 14 percent. Minimum bis seems to be 250 SEK (38 US$). Loan term seems to be customizable as 3 of the current listings are for 3 years and one is for 1 month.

Loanland is backed by experienced entrepreneurs. Aside Kaplan there are Mary Groschopp, before at OMX, Peter Nordlander, founder of Avanza, Peter Settman, founder of Baluba.

If you use Loanland please share your experiences in the wiseclerk forum.

Sources (1,2,3,4 all in swedish language)

In a post at PersonalLoanPortfolio the first experiences of a lender at Lendingclub.com are given. The author says the Lendingclub website was easy to use and understand, but states that the list of loans to fund is too small, resulting in him investing only $400 instead of the planned $500.

If you are a lender at Lendingclub please share your experiences.

Circlelending, bought by Virgin USA in May, has been renamed Virgin Money USA. According to Netbanker, we can expect the service to offer peer to peer lending like Prosper and Lendingclub in the future and this service might be used as an entry for more financial services. (Another source: NYTimes)

Dutch p2p lending service Boober.nl changed the rules last week. Lenders are now restricted to a maximum investment sum of 39000 Euro. Boober told users that this step confirms that Boober is a platform for individuals and not for professionals or companies. It is believed that this step was neccessary due to regulation.

German Smava has restricted lenders to a maximum of 25000 Euros since the start. This too, is a precaution, since under German regulation professional lending without a license is not allowed.

Every once in a while, I read a post in the Prosper forums that provides lots of insights. Today I found this post interesting where several lenders debate the advantages and disadvantages of investing in Prosper.com and long-term lenders share their opinion. Suggested reading for new lenders.

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.

Zopa, a competitor of Prosper.com, is on it's way to enter two additional markets (aside from UK and the long planned launch in California), informed sources say.

This source stating Zopa will launch in Germany as next country, is a false report however. It is based on a misleading interpretation of a German newspaper interview.

A summary of the situation for p2p lending in Germany is published at p2p-kredite.com. It states that there are tough regulatory issues to be solved and that it is expected that a first service might launch in late 2007 or early 2008.