Education microfinance service Vittana.org (see earlier coverage about Vittana) now enables lenders to relend directly. Lenders no longer need to go through Paypal for every payment and repayment.
CEO Kushal Chakrabarti says: “Today, I have the honor of announcing that, as of last week, Vittana lenders had given over 200,000 US$ in loans to hundreds of young people who want to become engineers, policemen, biologists and much more.”
In German the “green” party has initiated a parliament inquiry asking the government to ask 25 questions regarding it’s position towards p2p lending. While the party in the preamble describes p2p lending as a chance for consumers potentially offering them more choices, the wording of most of the questions exhibits that the green party is mostly concerned about the risks and implies that p2p lending is not enough regulated.
(Source: P2P-Kredite.com)
A Bloomberg article reports that Prosper seeks to be regulated like a bank in order to avoid the jurisdiction of the SEC.
German p2p lending service Auxmoney.com has introduced a new feature this week. Borrowers can now offer a car as collateral for a p2p loan.
The user pays a fee of 9.95 Euro to document this in his loan listing. Pictures of the car, the model and the mileage and the estimated price a car dealer would pay for car are displayed in the listing. In this example listing, the borrower puts up his BMW as collateral. The estimated value covers 101% of the loan amount requested. In general the car can cover any percentage of the loan amount – it does not need to cover the full amount. Furthermore there is information on the type of insurance coverage.
If the loan is funded, then a contract defines the terms of the assignment as security. The borrower continues to drive the car (obviously he is not allowed to sell it without the consent of Auxmoney), but needs to deposit the certificate of ownership (motor vehicle registration certificate) at Auxmoney. This arrangement costs the borrower 2 Euro per month.
Should the borrower fail to repay the loan, then Auxmoney has the right to sell the car.
While a car as collateral does in not provide fail-safe security (many things can happen), it will be probably perceived by lenders as one feature for higher security against defaults.
The Wiseclerk Auxmoney stats page will in future track the performance of p2p loans secured by cars.
This is a first for p2p lending – but soon another p2p lending service will follow. Pärtel Tomberg, CEO of Estonian p2p lending service Isepankur told P2P-Banking.com earlier this month, that Isepankur will introduce cars and real estate as collateral for p2p loans in the second half of 2010.
(Photo by pedrosimoes7)
P2P lending service Lending Club did up to now only offer 3 year loans. Today Lending Club adds 5 year loans.
This is a guest post by Tuomas Talola, CEO of coming Finnish P2P lending site Lainaaja and blogger at Cloudfunder.
Peer-to-peer lending has been growing rapidly since the inception in 2005. Lending amounts are small compared to traditional banks, but potential is immense. What would it take to really break into mainstream and become a potential option to large customer masses?
What Is the Chasm and Target Customers?
Geoffrey A. Moore wrote a highly appraised book called Crossing the Chasm in 1991. The book was about high-tech products marketing during the early stages and the difficulties of reaching majority of customers. In this post I’ll take a look what can be learned from the insights of the book and how to apply it to P2P lending.
Crossing the Chasm - Source:Wikpedia
According to Moore, there is a chasm between early adopters (technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the early majority (pragmatists). Visionaries and pragmatists have very different expectations and this might be the reason why many technology products fail. Selling to the Early Adopters is easier, they are people who are always looking the new revolutionary technologies. As a group, they are easy to sell but very hard to please. Continue reading