That is how the new Sales & Product manager Tanya Cordrey of Zopa described the planned Zopa Listings yesterday in a Zopa Chat. Quote: "It is the ability for borrowers to post listings and it gives lenders the opportunity to lend choose individuals" Zopa plans to get this feature live next month.
The question about the chance for a secondary market was answered by that there is not enough volume yet (maybe next year). The chat was attended by many Zopa employees including the CEO. The transcript is available.
No despite the sound of the title this is no joke. With at little as $4 you can help the quest to remove landmine. The herorat.org project trains rats to search landmines because this is a cheap and reliable way to locate landmines with little risk to the rats. While the site has a cartoon appearance this is NOT a game – read the Press centre for media coverage (e.g. CNN). I donated.
Note: Most of the following is an observation of lenders opinions voiced in the Prosper forums (with sources given). The opinions voiced in the cited threads are the opinions of the individual lenders who posted them.
Topics include lack of communication from prosper, failure to adress process problems, banning lenders, closing threads, … .
Posts call for "Class Action Lawsuit", informing Venture Capital firms who funded Prosper about the situation as the lenders posting see it and the call for withrawing funds.
One main cause for the unrest are the low ROIs large long term lenders are experiencing. This post says there are 203 lenders which have loans over 6 month old and more the 25K invested. For these the post says the average estimated ROI is 1.91%.
The result is that some long time lenders churn Prosper.com and stopped investing, while new lenders continue to pour in money.
As the following chart shows the count of lenders who have bid within the last 30 days stalls since April.
The automatic diversification mechanism LendingMatch can now be used with as little as $500. LendingMatch uses the $500 to build a portfolio of 25 different loans
claims usability improvements on referral program, that pays $5 for successful invitations
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.
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.
