P2P-Banking.com

In the Netherlands p2p lending service Boober apparently has ceased operations. The website Boober.nl has been inaccessible for days and no one was available for comment as the phone went unanswered.

There are reports by lenders, who complain that loans are not serviced as usual. Even one borrower is seeking help, because he cannot get the monthly payment through to Boober.

As of the moment it was not possible to determine how outstanding loans will be dealt with.

Since the new release, MyC4.com has encoutered repeated accounting problems, sometimes with wrong interest calculations, sometimes requiring correction of user account balances. 

Examples of incidents: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

MyC4's staff has been quick to respond to the problems and usually is fixing them fast.
But I believe the issue here is, that p2p lending through a foreign internet startup requires a great amount of trust. And while lenders are used to bugs in new internet application, they do expect a high standard when it comes to accounting. After all no user of online banking would accept that he has to check the interest calculations made by the bank. 

The MyC4 team did a good job developing the platform so far and earned at lot of trust; but if the problems persists this might be an obstacle to further growth. 

Browsing the Zopa forums today, I noticed that negative posts by lenders are on the rise. This is quite different from the mostly positive feedback in earlier months.

Lenders are:

• unhappy with bug-fixing progress,
• say there are accounting problems,
• complain about lack of communication (here, too),
• lack of progress in product development in past year.

While the staff in many cases does not immeadiately solve the voiced problems, at least they are much more responsive in the forum compared to the Prosper staff in the Prosper forum.

Some of the complaints may turn out to be misunderstandings. Bear in mind, that only a tiny minority of the Zopa lenders are active posters in the Zopa forum, therefore it is quite possible that a fast majority of Zopa's lenders is still very satisfied with the service.

Users suspect problems may have risen, because Zopa stuff could be tied up with issues concerning US launch.

Since two days the status field for the loans in the xml file of the Prosper data export is empty. Unfortunately this causes problems in some of the wiseclerk reports, which either show wrong values or are empty (e.g. the late loan list). For newly created or update maps the status of the loans is wrong, too.

Be assured that the reports will work fine again, once the the data export file contains correct values again.