Zopa Turns 7 – Arranged over 180M Pounds in Loans

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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.

Ratesetter Adds More P2P Lending Choices

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Ratesetter yesterday added more choices. Borrowers can select loan terms of up to 5 years.  Lenders can invest money for 1 or 5 years (in addition to the existing monthly access and 3 year term choices). It is interesting that Ratesetter has decoupled the borrower’s products from the lender’s products. For a borrower loan with an 18 month term there is no directly matching lender product. Ratesetter will combine funds invested in monthly access with money invested in 1 year bonds to fund these loans.

Bottom line of this, as I see it, is that Ratesetter will steer towards more active management of the money invested. Unlike other p2p lending marketplaces that act more like a platform, but where the users alone make the investment decisions, Ratesetter will directly take action.

Communitylend Closes – Company Focuses on FinanceIt instead

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Today Canadian p2p lending site Communitylend announced that it will close the p2p lending marketplace to focus on its consumer lending business. Communitylend will continue to service existing loans; there will just be no new ones.

Quote from the announcement:

If you have been following the CommunityLend Peer to Peer (P2P) Lending story over the years you might have been wondering why we have been so quiet here here recently.   The short answer is that we have been trying to decide how much more time to spend on our P2P Lending site in light of a larger and faster growing consumer lending business we also operate called Financeit™.

We have now made the decision that we will be suspending the operations of our P2P lending site so that our team can focus solely on Financeitâ„¢.

This has not been an easy decision for us but one which has come about over time because of our observation that P2P Lending, as it needs to operate within the Canadian regulatory system today, has enough headwinds blowing against it that getting to a significant scale was going to be both expensive and difficult.   As we searched for solutions to these challenges as a P2P Lending operator, we kept our focus on our desired goal, to create a lending product for Canadians that gave them a less expensive and more convenient way to get an instalment loan.

We realized that we needed to get closer to where the borrowing “transaction”’ occurred instead of recruiting the borrower after the fact.  People buy things in a store location (offline and online) and too often just use their credit cards and then carry balances with high interest rates.  We realized that helping people at this transaction moment was the key to driving interest in our lending product.  This conclusion led us quickly to focus on sales finance and starting in late 2010 we launched a market leading sales finance platform called Financeitâ„¢. Continue reading →

Crowdcube Celebrates First Birthday – Crowdcube Infographic

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British P2P Equity marketplace startup Crowdcube celebrates its first anniversary (Happy Birthday from P2p-Banking, too :-)). Lately Crowdcube picked up speed substantially in attracting more and more startups pitching for funding. While investors are currently very selective in what to fund, the volume funded has shown nice growth too. The following infographic by Crowdcube illustrates that (see ‘Amount invested’).


(Source: Crowdcube) Continue reading →

How Do the Efforts of Prosper and Lending Club in Search Engine Marketing Compare?

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Internet ventures are dependant to a certain degree to new visitors that are referred to them via search engines. A visitor that did a search on a very specific search term, e.g. ‘get a personal loan’ will have a very high chance to sign up if after that search he is introduced to the Prosper or Lendingclub website. There are tools that measure how ‘visible’ a domain is on Google and other search engines providing an index chart, that allows to compare the visibility of several websites.

Prosper’s visibility index (blue line) is much higher than Lendingclub’s. Prosper.com ranks good for more and more important keywords in organic search rankings. Organic search means, that Prosper shows in a the search results at search engines that are not paid ads. But which search terms do the actually rank for? Continue reading →

Adwords Marketing Activity of British P2P Lending Marketplaces

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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 →