British P2P Lending marketplace Zopa celebrated its 7th birthday today. Zopa was the first to initiate a p2p lending marketplace over the internet, an innovation that meanwhile has grown to an industry with dozens of p2p lending services launched operating in most G20 economies.
Giles Andrews, cofounder and CEO of Zopa said, ‘After 7 years, Zopa members continue to enjoy better rates on personal loans and savings than the banks offer. Meanwhile, despite their size and virtual monopoly, banks have struggled to even stay solvent, requiring huge taxpayer bailouts.’
Since launch, Zopa has arranged more than 185 million GBP (approx. 291M US$) in loans. As older loans have been repaid, an estimated 90M is currently still loaned out. According to company statements Zopa loans now account for between 1% and 2% of all new personal loans issued in the UK each month. In January Zopa arranged more than 8.2 million GBP of loans.
I did some research on use of Google Adwords in the online marketing strategy of Zopa, Funding Circle and Ratesetter.
Who is most active in search engine advertising?
I was surprised to see that Funding Circle is the most active in advertising on Google Adwords.
The chart shows that Fundingcircle had active ads nearly the whole year, while Zopa ran the ads only for certain intervals and Ratesetter only gave it a small try. Continue reading →
Zopa Italy will rebrand and change domain and company name. The new service will be available at Smartika.it. Maurizio Sella, CEO of Zopa Italy announced that the franchise agreement with Zopa has been resolved. The new company operates under the status of a payment institute.
Zopa has announced that it reached the milestone of 150 million GBP in loans facilitated. Zopa says the new loan volume per month accounts for between 1% and 2% of new personal loan volume made in the UK.
P2P lending service Lending Club announced yesterday that it has been selected as a World Economic Forum 2012 Technology Pioneer. Lending Club was selected from amongst hundreds of applicants from around the world that hold the promise of significantly impacting the way business and society operate.
The members say that the new UK trade body is set up primarily to ensure the growing sector maintains high minimum standards of protection for consumers and small business customers, as it brings much-needed new competition and innovation to the banking market. In Britain this year, peer-to-peer finance will account for more than £100 million of loans to individuals and small businesses. As new financial regulatory structures are put in place by the Government over the next 18 months or more, the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association will also work hard to ensure that the new rules will include effective regulation for the peer-to-peer finance market.
The association is open to other peer-to-peer providers subject to meeting the required standards. The Association has established a wide definition of peer-to-peer finance providers as: ‘platforms that facilitate funding via direct, one-to-one contracts between a single recipient and multiple providers of funds, where the majority of providers and borrowers are consumers or small businesses. Generally, funding is in the form of a simple loan, but other instruments may evolve over time.’
The Association’s Rules and Operating Principles set out the key requirements for the transparent, fair, robust and orderly operation of peer-to-peer finance platforms and cover: 1. Senior management systems and controls; 2. Minimum capital requirements; 3. Segregation of participants’ funds; 4. Clear rules governing use of the platform, consistent with these Operating Principles; 5. Marketing and customer communications that are clear, fair and not misleading; 6. Secure and reliable IT systems; 7. Fair complaints handling; and 8. The orderly administration of contracts in the event a platform ceases to operate.
Rhydian Lewis, CEO of RateSetter, said: “The message we want to send to the wider world is that Peer to Peer is working: Lenders across a number of sites are getting market beating returns on their savings, Borrowers are getting lower cost loans, and increasingly P2P finance is becoming more established in the mainstream. As an industry, we would all encourage clearer regulation of P2P finance (not least because it would address the perception that P2P is somehow not regulated). The Association will give us a platform with which to lobby for P2P to be considered on an equal footing with other financial services.â€
Recently Zopa UK removed the ‘Listings’ functionality that allowed borrowers to list individual loans. Listings were introduced in October 2007 as a add-on to the original Zopa markets model.
Here is the official announcement of Zopa regarding the removal of the Listings function:
You might know that Zopa is a little unusual amongst the now 30+ peer-to-peer lending companies running worldwide in that we facilitate the vast majority of loans through the Zopa Markets; almost all the other peer-to-peer lenders make all their loans using something more like our Listings. Indeed, we weren’t first-to-market with the Listings approach, adding them to our site about two and a half years after we first launched. Since then some 700 Zopa borrowers have received loans totaling £4.3m using Zopa Listings and there’s been some great ones in there; from guitar re-stringing, to a planetarium, a few bits of plastic surgery and of course plenty of cars.
Sadly though, while those figures sound quite good, they only represent a very small proportion of total Zopa lending and that proportion is declining too, while the rest of our business is growing rapidly. Couple that with Listings being much more long-winded to underwrite and we hope you’ll understand why we’ve taken the tough decision to draw Zopa Listings to a close.
… we’ll remove the functionality from the site that allows borrowers to create a new Listing. All the Listings that are already live before this point will of course be allowed to continue to their natural conclusion and once they’re all finalized, we’ll remove all references to Listings from the site.
If you’ve taken part in any lending via Listings, you’ll still be able to keep track of them and monitor how they’re being repaid in My Loan Book, where you can now find a link to your borrower’s original Listing page in the detail page of the loan in My Loan Book (click on the borrower’s username to open this view).
