Symbid is the first service to launch the p2p equity concept in the Netherlands. Most of the site is available in Dutch only, but the info film is in English so I will embed that here. Apparently there will be an English language version of the site soon.
390,000 US$ P2P Loan Funded via Rebirth Financial
Rebirth Financial announced that it facilitated a 390,000 US$ loan via it’s social lending platform to NOLA Brewing Company. You can read more about NOLA Brewing company here.
The press release says: “In the case of NOLA Brewing, Rebirth Financial matched the loan to ASI Federal Credit Union in less than one week. ‘Rebirth’s process was quick, easy, and helped us raise the necessary funding to can our beer,’ said Dylan Lintern, Vice President of NOLA Brewing Company.“.
If I read this right and the loan was funded by just one institutional lender you can hardly file this under Rebirth Financial’s claim “Rebirth Financial Inc. debuted America’s first person-to-business lending platform … in February. It allows people to lend small sums of money to small businesses in their community.“. I wrote to the founder Chonchol Gupta who replied: “This loan started as a p2p loan but was fully funded by the credit union, who would not have seen the loan or perhaps given thought to it, if it was not for the groundswell of community interest. Banks see it as great PR to fund loans important to the community.“
Recent News from P2P Lending Blogs
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
The Merge of P2P Lending and Crowdfunding
P2P Lending and crowdfunding are two totally different concepts you say? True so far.
P2P Lending means the lender loans the borrower money. The amount is repaid together with interest.
Crowdfunding is usually applied to describe concepts were a crowd decides to finance project. The motivation there is to see the project getting done. The funds are not paid back but spent on the project and investors are sometimes rewarded with the art or products that are a result of the project. A good example for a crowdfunding platform is Kickstarter, which P2P-Banking.com covered earlier – see article: ‘Kickstarter – Pledge Money to Fund an Artist‘.
Moneyauction creates ‘Reward Funding’ – merges P2P Lending and Crowdfunding
Moneyauction, a leading p2p lending service in Korea, now announced their ‘reward funding’ option. Continue reading
Do Your Friends Determine If You Are Creditworthy?
A new US patent filed claims that may be a good idea! The patent application “System and method for assessing credit risk in an on-line lending environment” describes a risk assessment method, where the first level links on a social network would be checked for a borrower. It aims to derive insights from looking at the age and “activity” of these first level contacts.
Does What Your Friends Say About You Determine If You Are Creditworthy?
In a step further the method suggests to “invite linked users to provide a personal endorsement of the borrowing party; sending an endorsement invitation to identified users; and receiving endorsements from the identified users, the endorsement providing a rating of the user trustworthiness based on a numerical scale; determining and aggregate endorsement score from received endorsement which is included in the assessment score”
Assessment score to be used as one of several criteria
The patent filed by Canadian company Neobanx Technologies, Inc was previously already filed in Canada. Inventors Ronald N. Ingram, Dylan Littlewood and Aston Lau describe the whole process with assessment score and endorsement score being only 2 of multiple elements that are used to assess the risk.
The potential problems with using data from social networks for the purpose of risk assessment in p2p lending were already described in detail in the article: “For Debate: Can Data from Social Networks be Used to Reduce Risks in P2P Lending“. I still think that social network data could be used to some degree as additional data for lenders – but not to the degree this patent seems to imply.
It would be most interesting to see this implemented and monitor how it works out.
What is your opinion, dear reader?
Study Shows Women P2P Lenders Not More Risk-Averse
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