Zopa prepares launch in Italy

wiseclerk 4 Comments

Actually Zopa.it is not run by the British Zopa Ltd. but by the franchise “P2P s.r.l” with offices in Milano. The company has licensed the use of the brand and the technology for Italy. Zopa.it will allow Italians to borrow up to 40000 Euro (roughly $55000), which is a high amount, compared to p2p services in other countries.

The company was created by Nova partners, Milan, together with New College Capital Ltd.

It is possible to pre-register on Zopa.it to be notified at launch time.

Sources(1, 2, 3,  and own research)

Correction and Update: I must excuse myself to have confused the CEO of Zopa Italy with another Italian banker with identical name. As Carlo of Zopa Italy pointed out in a comment to this post: “Zopa Italy’s Ceo is Maurizio Pietro Sella, not Maurizio Sella. Maurizio Pietro started is working career with Banco di Santo Spirito (Capitalia Group), then joined in 1990 Citibank, where he had several assignements (mainly in London and Switzerland) and in 2002 the Julius Baer Group in Geneva. Before Zopa Maurizio Pietro was CEO of Julius Baer Creval Private Banking Spa, a joint venture between the Julius Baer Group and Gruppo Credito Valtellinese.”

According to unverified sources the venture raised 2.8 million Euro funding from its shareholders. It is speculated that Zopa Italy will take higher fees (maybe 1 percent from lender and 1 percent from borrower) than Zopa in England. This seems possible since consumer banking costs in Italy are generally higher.

Lendingclub to introduce p2p lending to Facebook members

wiseclerk 4 Comments

Lending Club

Today, Lendingclub.com launched offering a p2p lending service to Facebook members. Members can request loans between $1000 and $25000. Other facebook members can the lend the money to the borrower. While technically not arranging loans between freinds like CircleLending, Lendingclub makes uses of the social network and the trust that users have into it. Lendingclub combines aspects from other p2p lending sites like Prosper.com and Zopa.com.

Comparing it to Prosper:

  • Lendingclub requires higher credit score as threshold for borrowers to apply (640 compared to Prosper’s 520)
  • Lendingclub suggests an interest rate based on the borrowers credit grade rather than letting the borrower set an interest rate.
  • There are groups like at Prosper

Lendingclub uses what it calls “LendingMatch” to automatically match parties on shared connection it finds. Lenders can additionally manually select and search loans.

Lendingclub

The founders of Lendingclub, one of them has a background at Mastercard, raised $2 million in angel funding (source: VentureBeat).

Using an existing social network gives Lendingclub a great marketing advantage over competitor Prosper.com, which had to build its memberbase starting from zero.