When I decided to withdraw some money from my Kiva account, I was informed:
This email confirms your withdrawal request of $25.00. You can expect the funds to be deposited into your paypal account within 1-3 weeks.
This astonished me. The withdrawal is conducted via paypal (as is the upload). The upload was almost instantly. Therefore I did not expect the withdrawal to take weeks.
BTW: So far my Kiva loans all pay on time.
Short news update on Prosper.com developments:
German p2p lending service Smava has sent its lenders an email asking them to produce short videos telling their personal experiences using Smava. Smava offers 50 Euro (approx. 75 US$) for each user generated video that is sent to Smava and published.
Three (older) videos by Smava lenders can be viewed here.
Zopa UK has raised fees for new lenders to 1% (annual of capital outstanding). Old lenders continue to be served at the 0.5% fee.
MyC4.com will start to offer loans in Rwanda next week. This is the fourth country MyC4 is lending at, after Uganda, Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire. Mads Kjaer, CEO of MyC4, is quoted that Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal and South Africa will follow. In 2009 he aims to serve borrowers in 20 countries in Africa. (Source)
In a danish television video (15 min, danish language), which was broadcastes yesterday, MyC4 is presented as a good alternative for investing and gains a recommendation of MyBanker.dk, a website comparing banks.
Maneo.jp aims to be the first active p2p lending service in Japan. Their mission statement (from a press release):
maneo Inc. plans to offer a user friendly and highly secure online community for people to borrow and lend money through an online auction system. maneo is about helping people lend and borrow money with each other, sidestepping the expense and inconvenience of traditional banks and consumer finance companies. People who want to borrow money register with maneo and create loan listings. Potential lenders register with maneo and bid on the loan listings they are interested in. maneo aggregates the bids with the lowest rates to fund the relevent loans and handles all of the administrative matters relating to the loans
Maneo received venture capital from J-Seed Ventures Inc. and Yasuda Enterprise Development Co., Ltd. The last funding round was in April 2008 for 80 million Yen (approx. 0.75 million US$). The first funding round was in April 2007.
The company website currently says “Coming in Summer 2008”. Zopa and Prosper also have announced plans for Japan, but no launch date has been set so far.
(Sources/further reading: 1, 2, 3 – all in japanese)
