Here are some recently published articles on several p2p lending topics:
Sociallending.net: The Best Day to Borrow Money at Lending Club
P2P Lending News: Prosper and Lending Club Compete for Investor Market Share
CreditUnionTimes: Consultant Warns Banks and CUs Risk Becoming Passé
DoughRoller: Lending Club Investment Strategy (Update)
Janari Rahablog: Omaraha.ee laenude vahenduse portaal
GlobalVoices: Brazil: Crowdfunding Potential
Are women more risk-averse then men when it comes to lending money to strangers via p2p lending services? A recent study by Nataliya Barasinska, analyzed what impact gender has on the investment decisions. In the study, which was supported by a grant by the European Commission, she looked at bidding and loan data of the German p2p lending service Smava for the time span from March 2007 to March 2010.
Women are a minority among lenders, but are no more risk-averse than men
Only about 10% of the lenders at Smava are women. But they do not perceive and react to risks differently than men, when it comes to picking loans for investments. Continue reading
CommunityLend has closed a 1.5 million CAN$ private placement from several individual angel investors and an institutional investment fund. The proceeds of this private placement will go to scaling up loan origination, loan adjudication, and loan servicing operations, the company says, continuing:
This investment comes on the heels of a successful year since our launch as Canada’s 1st (and only) online consumer loan marketplace by CommunityLend Inc. Monthly loan volume has more than doubled each of the last 3 months and we are projecting this pace of growth to continue throughout 2011.
(Source: Communitylend blog)
German p2p lending Smava completed another financing round. The new capital raised comes from the VCs that already invested in earlier rounds.
Earlybird increased their investment from previously 39% of shares to now 56% and Neuhaus Partners increased their part from 12.5% of share to now 17%.
The original founders Alexander Artopé, Sebastian Rieschel and Eckart Vierkant now combined hold less than 8%.
Speculation is that the high customer acquisition costs (especially for borrowers) led to the need for another financing round. Estimates put the cost for borrower acquisition as high as 500 Euro. In certain customer acquisition partnerships, Smava pays the partner up to 1.3% of the loan amount (equals 650 Euro for a borrower with the maximum loan amount of 50,000 Euro). While Smava is growing, the growth rate has in the past months stopped to accelerate and is about 2 million Euro funded loan volume per month (chart).
Lendingclub.com raised the maximum amount for loans from 25,000 to 35,000 US$ yesterday. I expect this will raise the monthly originations further.
Watch the preview of the coming new Zopa TV advert. It will air starting next Monday on channels like Dave, More4, Sky Sports 2 and ITV4. There will be a second version emphasizing how Zopa is different from banks.