MyC4 users can now easily give someone a MyC4 account as Christmas gift. With a 6 step process the user creates an account, transfers money and prints a christmas voucher.
The recipient is all set to start investing in loans.
Is this a clever viral marketing idea? Post your take on this in the wiseclerk forum!
According to the Wall Street Journal p2p lending service Zopa will launch in the US next week. Zopa has been established in the UK since 2005. The long announced US start had been postponed several times due to regulation issues.
In the US Zopa will partner with six credit unions. Lenders will benefit since they can be sure to get their principal back – deposits are insured up to $100,000 per member. This is new for p2p lending, where lenders usually carry the default risk (only Dutch p2p lending service Boober.nl guarantees for certain credit grades the bulk of the pricipal via insurance against default.
According to the WSJ article neither lenders nor borrowers will have to pay fees to use Zopa but have to sign up with one of the six participating credit unions.
An article on Netbanker.com already spoke of congestion, since Globefunder and Loanio will launch at a later stage and Prosper, Lending Club and Virgin Money are active in the market.
What's your opinion on this? Post your thoughts in the wiseclerk forum!
Today a new MyC4 release went online. The new version allows multiple standing orders which can be targeted by country, provider and/or industry of the borrower. There are several small improvements in usability, e.g. display of borrower APR.
MyC4 users have transfered 507,000 Euro in funds, but so far only 214,000 Euro of those have been loaned. Demand in loan opportunities is lagging behind investor's cash looking for investments. The majority of lenders (investors) still is Danish – MyC4 is located in Denmark, but the number of investors in other countries is rising.
So far I am satisfied with MyC4. I have invested in more than 50 active loans – true microloans – sometimes my share is as low 10 Euro – and so far everything is going smooth. Another 16 bids are on open listing opportunities.
As some of you might have noticed, the main page of Wiseclerk.com changed today and now offers a p2p lending discussion forum. I believe there is a huge need for information on the developing p2p lending services. In this spirit I started Wiseclerk.com in April 2006 to create useful overview reports on Prosper. While it was not the first site of this kind (some oldtimers may remember Savagenumber.com by atlantageek) it did grow quickly and built a loyal userbase among Prosper lenders.
Prosper did from the beginning support the efforts of developers by providing data publicly and later offering data export interfaces and APIs.
Both the Wiseclerk reports and the later added blog were started with a focus on Prosper. That was appropriate at that point in time but now I think a broader view is needed. Lenders can choose between several p2p lending services and the flow of information needs to be taken to a meta platform level. Lenders that lend on several platforms will not want to check several forums – each one tied to the single platform.
The new forum will also serve as a feedback and discussion location for ideas and news published in the p2p-banking blog. Later today I will add a display into the blog that shows the latest discussion threads from the forum.
Lendingclub.com now enables members to be a borrower AND a lender. Borrowers can have multiple loans, credit policy guidelines permitting. Lendingclub also added a Q&A feature and improved statistics. The new referral program enables this offer:
$25 bonus for you, when you sign up as a lender here (bonus credited after you funded your account)
$25 bonus for you, when you sign up as a borrower here (bonus credited after loan application)
Launched in February 2006 American peer to peer lending service Prosper.com has surpassed the threshold of 100 million US$ in loans funded. Prosper is the largest peer to peer lending service. Growth peaked during 2nd quarter of 2007, where funded loan volume per month reached approx 8 million US$.