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€
Like several other internet companies MYC4 was hard-hit by the outage of Amazon’s Data Center in Ireland. Days later the MYC4 site is still down with only the blog (which resides on WordPress) functional.
Last week, following 2 years of preparation, Seedmatch launched the first p2p equity service in Germany. Startups can pitch for up to 100,000 EUR (approx. 142,600 US$) funding. Investors can bid amounts starting form 250 EUR.
Due to the legal and regulatory situation Seedmatch uses a construct (“Stille Beteiligung”), where investors do not become shareholders of the funded startup, but rather participate on the profits of the company. Founder Jens-Uwe Sauer says: “…thesilent partner’s holding are structured at Seedmatchto participateondividendsandcapital gainsofthe start-ups. It was important for ustooffera good solutionforbothsides– for themicro-investors afair deal and forthestartupsa manageablefinancial model.” (translated from German by P2P-Banking.com).
The startups have the choice to buy-out investors after 6 years. The Seedmatch model thereby gives much more control to startups and less rights to investors in comparison to Symbid and Crowdcube. On the other side the raised funding is not paid out in one sum, but rather in steps according to milestones reached (which were specified in the pitch). Seedmatch charges startups 5 to 10% of the raised amount. Continue reading →
P2P Lending service Lending Club has raised another 25 million US$ funding.
Union Square Ventures led the Series D round and joins Lending Club as a Board Observer. All existing venture investors participated in the funding round.
“We are thrilled to welcome Union Square Ventures as an equity partner,†said Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche. “While we did not need additional funding, we could not pass up the opportunity to work closely with the USV team and their network of companies. USV will be instrumental in continuing to accelerate Lending Club’s growth and in leveraging our technology platform and network effect to simultaneously reduce the cost of credit to borrowers and enhance investors’ returns.â€
The new funding brings Lendingclub’s total funding to 77.7 million US$.
Time for me to personally test Symbid (see earlier coverage) and try out how smooth the process is and how easy it is to invest in a startup with Symbid.
No matter how remote you live – be it India or Argentina – you can invest in an internet startup online within minutes and get shares – all you need is a credit card
This article is a step by step review of the signup and investment process.
If you have not read the previous articles, watch the brief video on the Symbid homepage which explains the concept. First step to use Symbid is the free registration. Most parts of the website can be used without a registration, but registration is needed to view detailed company information and to invest.
To register either click on “Join Symbid” via “Start Investing”. Instead of the registration form I expected to see, I got this screen:
It wasn’t obvious at first to me that I need to click on the symbid key symbol to reach the registration form (I did not want to use my Facebook or Twitter account). Next hurdle was the missing country field in sign-up (Symbid is open to international investors – seems they forgot adding it when opening to international). I solved it by adding country into the city field (city, country).
Once registered, I could add some information about me on the profile.
To start investing the next necessary step is to ‘upload’ money (minimum is 20 Euro which equals approx 29 US$). To upload money you first request a security code. They send an email with a link. After I clicked on it I could setup a personal 4 digit code.
With that code the process to upload money is started (‘upgrade Balance’). The selection allows for 20 Euro steps, as 20 Euro is the minimum unit that can be invested.
