Loanland.se is the first Swedish p2p lending service. Founder Daniel Kaplan, who in 2006 headed the successful sale of Swedish auction site Tradera to Ebay for 48 million US$, sees a great potential for peer to peer lending in Sweden.
At Loanland, borrowers with the best credit grade can borrow up to 300,000 SEK (approx 45,000 US$), while borrowers with the lowest admitted credit grade can borrow up to 3,000 SEK (approx 450 US$). But borrowers are able to achieve a better credit rating by paying back on time and then can later borrow a larger amount, says Kaplan.
As of today the site had 4 loan listings with interest rates between 4 and 14 percent. Minimum bis seems to be 250 SEK (38 US$). Loan term seems to be customizable as 3 of the current listings are for 3 years and one is for 1 month.
Loanland is backed by experienced entrepreneurs. Aside Kaplan there are Mary Groschopp, before at OMX, Peter Nordlander, founder of Avanza, Peter Settman, founder of Baluba.
If you use Loanland please share your experiences in the wiseclerk forum.
Sources (1,2,3,4 all in swedish language)
I have registered at Loanland.se as an investor, and started with the minimum investment of 1000 SEK. One can invest in steps of 250 SEK, and the investors compete over interest rate to fill the loan request.
Personally I’m rather disappointed with loanland. Even though they have experienced people in the board, they don’t seem to learn much from similar sites. A few examples?
– There is no message board that would allow people to communicate with each other, suggest improvements, discuss investment strategies, etc.
– The site has a very intransparent information policy. One cannot search for a borrower’s (or lender’s) profile, if they already have any loans, nothing.
– There’s no statistics about how many loans are running, how many have run into trouble… Nothing
– After a loan has been set up and paid out to the borrower, I (lender) can’t even see the info text that I based my investment decision on. Come on, harddisk space is not that expensive, why would you not offer this information?
– The fees seem very high, and are very hard to predict. The lenders have to share a fixed fee (120 SEK for a 6-36 month loan). So if the loan request is not filled completely, this fee can become so high (per lender) that the whole investment becomes unprofitable. 🙁
So far I would recommend people to either stay away from this site, or at least wait until the site has improved vastly.