P2P-Banking.com

A recent Bankrate.com article gives an update on the development of p2p lending in the US.

Chris Larsen of Prosper.com sees the current financial situation as a chance for p2p lenders:

Home equity used to be the cash management tool for the credit-worthy borrower, and that has really, really dried up. In many ways, Prosper's three-year, 25,000 US$ loan is a pretty good proxy for what people were using home equity for — improving their home, starting a sole proprietorship, college costs and certainly for replacing credit card debt.

Javelin Strategy & Research is quoted that credit card debt is the main reason people want to use p2p lending:

We're forecasting that P2P lending specifically for credit card balances will grow from 38 billion US$ in 2007 to 159 billion US$ by 2012

The final advice of the article is:

Prospective borrowers and lenders would do well to thoroughly research P2P companies before jumping at the chance for a lower rate on a loan or a higher return on an investment. …

The Wikipedia article on Prosper was for months subject to heated editing and deleting. Not much diplomacy. Some edits wanted to get as much criticism in as possible while others removed as much negative tone as possible to get it more neutral. Currently the article is locked.
See the discussion on what should be stated in the article in the future when it will be unlocked again.

After MyC4.com was featured on Danish national TV in a 15 minute feature many new lenders signed up. Within 3 days lender count rose from about 500 to currently 964. At MyC4 lenders (called investors) loan money to African entrepreneurs. The bidding frency of new lenders did lower closing interest rate dramatically. Loans now closed at 2 to 3 percent lender interest rate (previously usually 10 to 12 percent). MyC4 will now have to increase the number of listings, otherwise they might be temporably be sold out like happened to Kiva.
Yesterday the first loan listings from Ivory Coast went online.

Today a Wall Street Journal article on p2p lending and Prosper.com featured Wiseclerk.com as one of the 3rd party tracking services supplying information for lenders and borrowers.

With the click of a mouse late Thursday night March 1, 2007, the leader of the Two Millionaires Group on Prosper.com admitted the 5,509th member and created the largest group on Prosper ever! The one remaining challenge at the time was to beat PsychDoc's record number of loans created….

Asked about how his group succeeded in growing so large so rapidly, "TwoMillionaires1" the group leader replied that he did a lot of internet marketing in the beginning to bring new members in, and it grew from there to the point where today word of mouth from contented borrowers brings in probably hundreds of new members each week.

 "It didn't hurt either to have a private website that has attracted more than 300,000 hits and 10,000 unique visitors," the group leader added.

An upcoming press release is likely to bring in a huge influx of new members over the next few weeks.

As of the date of this report, more than one and a half million dollars has been loaned to members of this popular people-to-people online borrowing and lending group, almost 400 individual loans.

Details are available at:

http://www.prosper.com

and

http://www.2mils.org

Okay, toot toot!

I was recently featured on a Las Vegas news program. I couldn't be more pleased with the production. Here is the link: http://www.kvbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=6109198

If you click on the small camera icon under the title and date, you'll see the program that has aired twice here. Now, if only Prosper had a license here!

If you have not seen it yet - check this new washington post article on prosper. Funny headline is "Want to Loan Me Money? Here's a Picture of My Dog."