Month: February 2007

Zopa to branch out into additional markets

wiseclerk

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.

Prosper loan growth accelerating

wiseclerk

Since the start about a year ago over 39 million dollar have been loaned through Prosper.com.
That averages to roughly 100k dollar new loans per day.
However when I look into the amounts of new prosper loans created lately I found out that last week loans for the amount of $1.48 million have been created and the week before $1.52 million.  

These statistics show that the growth of the Prosper business is picking up speed.

New report on open listings where borrower answered questions

wiseclerk

Inspired by this thread in the discussion forum, I added a report that shows all open listings where questions have been answered. Already there are 150 listings where questions have been publicly answered. The majority of those is one question, but there are several listings where 4 questions have been answered. Good to see that we won't need the RML section of the forums any more.

Keep in mind that the borrower can choose if Q&A is public or not

Boober.nl offers P2P lending in the Netherlands

wiseclerk 2 Comments

I just became aware of Boober.nl a new service that brings the concept of peer-to-peer lending to the Netherlands. As far as I am aware of this is the third market (after Zopa in UK and Prosper in US) where p2p credits over the internet are possible.

Since you probably do not read Dutch (the boober website does not have an english translation) – here is a short summary of the service:

  • Boober takes a fee of 1% (0.5% from lender, 0.5% from borrower) plus 19.95 Euro fee from borrower for creditrating plus annual fee of 9.95 Euro from lender
  • Loans are possible for amounts from 1500 to 10000 Euros (approx 13000 US$)
  • Lenders can invest from as little as 5 Euro to a maximum of 250 Euro in an individual listing
  • Available terms are 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48 and 60 months
  • Interest rates go up to 15%
  • As of today, there are 2 dozen open listings

Boober has more similiarities with Prosper than with Zopa since lenders can pick individual loans.The information available on borrowers listings is very limited but it has to be taken into account that boober launched only 2 weeks ago.

It will be interesting to see how Boober develops.

In case you are wondering what ‘Boober’ means. The website says that ‘Boober’ is the name of the dog of the founders, which they say is stubborn, creative and loyal.

Update: It is only possible to invest for lenders that are located in the Netherlands

Temporary problems with some reports

wiseclerk

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.

Group leader endorsement very valuable for loan funding

wiseclerk

Research conducted by Stanford Graduate School of Business shows that several variables statistically have very different impacts on the funding success of loans. E.g. a group leader endorsement is twice as effective as improving one credit grade.

This study is a must read for group leaders and is very interesting for lenders too.

Source: https://www.prosper.com/prm/3rdParty/Prosper_Regression_Project_-_Fundability_Study.pdf