P2P lending service Lendingclub.com, which was in a quite period not accepting new lenders and bids from existing lenders, today announced that it completed it’s SEC registration. LendingClub is now resuming it’s full p2p lending service and again accepting new lenders.
See: Lending Club completes $600 million SEC filing
More to follow…
This week the new social lending service Veecus.com launched. Veecus is a peer-to-peer microfinance network. It allows microentrepreneurs from all over the world to access funds to develop their projects. Lenders can select projects, invest and take part in economic development.
Microfinance institutions (MFIs) supply the loan listings and set the interest rates. Currently there are two MFIs active (VSSU and Oasis Microfinance), which list loans in India and Cameroon offering 3% interest rates.
Lenders can bid in multiples of 20 Euro. Currently uploading money is done via Paypal. Credit card payments will become available next week.
Veecus is run by a french limited company, run and owned by the co-founders Clément Carjat and Baptiste Fabre. Veecus will make money from a “volume-based fee paid by microfinance institutions once they
have received funds for microentrepreneurs projects.” as well as a 1 Euro one-time signup-fee from each lender.
The site is available in english and french language (the company blog is in french only). If you have tried Veecus please share your experiences with the community in our Forum.
The concept has similarities to Kiva and MyC4.
Image: One of the current project loan listings.
After several hours speculation following an email sent to some US lenders of Zopa including the statement “In addition, the Zopa social networking Web site will no longer be available as of October 9, 2008″, the Zopa CFO (UK) has posted a clarifing statement on the Zopa discussion board.
The email from Affinity Plus is partially correct in that we are transferring our customers relationships to the credit union they either borrowed from or bought a CD from (invested in). We are NOT shutting the website today. As most of you know, Zopa’s US operation has a very different model to that in the UK and Italy in that it works in partnership with financial institutions (the credit unions) rather than being a pure peer to peer marketplace as it is here and in Italy. So while our model is doing very well in current market conditions, the US has been adversely affected in a way that couldn’t have been predicted when we launched and is no way the fault of our partners. For me, a real shame is that we weren’t able to launch the original model over there for regulatory reasons, esp given what a great job the regulators have turned out to have been doing there over the last few years, but that is another story….
The decision has not been taken lightly, and has obviously been difficult for our US colleagues, but due to the current credit crisis we have decided to withdraw from the US marketplace. This decision will have no impact on Zopa’s other activities in the UK, Italy and Asia. Zopa’s UK operation has experienced significant volume increases in 2008 with huge growth in new members and increasing lender returns, while continuing to maintain excellent credit quality – currently less than 0.5% of loans are affected by any kind of late payment issue, with actual losses below 0.04%. Zopa Italy has achieved the highest growth of any European peer-to-peer operation since its launch in January, and has recently launched the first secondary market for any peer-to-peer operation.
Zopa’s US customers’ deposit accounts continue to be insured by the NCUA up to $250,000, and servicing of those accounts as well as the loans will be assumed by the credit unions within 90 days.
…
The US website does not appear to have any statement regarding the changes.
Update: There is a blog entry on the Zopa blog now.
Smava.de, offering p2p lending in Germany, today successfully closed it’s second VC round. Earlybird and Neuhaus Partners invested 4 million Euro (approx 5.5 million US$). Earlybird did already invest 4 million Euro in Smava in the first round. Smava CEO Alexander Artopé announced that Smava will use the money for product development, marketing and internationalization.
Smava funded a loan volume of 535,000 Euro in September generating revenues (1percent origination fee) of 5,350 Euro plus an undisclosed amount (my estimate:<1,000 Euro) in commissions for insurance products.
The growth of the funded volumes per month can be seen in this chart.
Social lending site Kiva.org celebrates it’s third anniversary. In this time Kiva loans with a volume of approximately 45 million US$ have been financed by over 340,000 Kiva users worldwide. The repayment rate is quoted as 98.6% (see more stats).
Currently Kiva hopes to win a 1.5 million US$ grant in the American Express members project vote. Currently Kiva is second (which would mean a $500,000 grant). If you are an American Express card holder, you still have 7 days to cast your vote.
Kiva also announced a partnership with Ernst&Young. The objective is:
To help facilitate the transparent flow of information and funds between individual lenders, micro-finance institutions, and borrowers, which will ultimately help Kiva continue to grow and serve more entrepreneurs.
Friendsclear.com has launched a french p2p lending service. Due to regulation issues it does differ very much from p2p lending services like Prosper or Zopa. Friendsclear only offers the tools for lenders and borrowers to agree on and document a loan and its payment. Friendsclear is not involved in the transfer of the money itself.
Director Jean-Christophe Capelli last year contributed the guest article ‘The situation of social lending in France‘.
French language blog sources with more background information: insiden, duperrin.com
