Peer to peer lending is about one individual lending money directly to another individual. By this definition there is no way companies as lenders would fit in, or is there?
I reported earlier that Prosper seeks a Vice President Institiutional Lender Development. Comments in the Prosper forums on that plans were mostly negative.

MyC4 founder Mads Kjaer has recently written about how MyC4 plans to win companies as lenders:

We have presently 3 type of beta Builder investors on MyC4:
– single individuals from viral and networks with own money, from 15 to 15t euro
– workplaces with employee's and/or teams investing with CSRand HR money
– company's who use the Auto Bid and invest as Club+15 (see below)

Workplaces:
The beta Builders/Investors are sometimes sharing a MyC4 account. We have workplaces likeToms Group being on MyC4 with 3 teams "Toms 1-2-3" and each of the teams are 4 people, being board of directors, manageent and random employee's who have volunteered to participate. Another example is Quatz who have 5 teams on MyC4. In November we have 120 people coming on board from Mondo, a technology company – again in teams of 5 people, so 24 MyC4 profiles. …

The thinking is that the companies want to be active in corporate social responsibility (CSR) or human ressource (HR) development. So the funds invested comefom CSR and HR budgets. This type of MyC4 profiles above typically invest 1-2 or 3 thousand MyCredits and the money "belongs" to the company. …

Company's:
MyC4 hold an ambition to be an infra structure for all kind of capital, e.g. also that company's can invest on MyC4 like they do in shares, futures, bond, credits etc and for the Auto Bid was developed for this purpose (evn if it can be used by all)

We have started introducing this concept – called Club +15 (for 2015 and for +15 thousand euro's) in September and presently more than 10 company's have signed up and paid capital in on MyC4 and activated their investment.

What we offer the company's on MyC4 in Club+15 -> you can make business/ROI, you can do good and you can learn and get new ideas while you support the United Nations MDGS and that Business can eradicate poverty….
Company's can obviously choose to increase funds to invest as they go like any single investor or the CSR and HR funds can. This is the way we plan to raise hundred of millions of euro to invest in Africa over the coming years.

The 'workplaces' approach allows an interesting twist to the peer to peer lending concept. Now there is larger funding by companies, but still individuals decide on which loans to fund. Since MyC4 has social aims – eradicting poverty – it fulfils a double purpose: funding loans and raising awareness among the employees who do the actual bidding.

Compared to that the 'Companies/Club 15' auto bid funding is rather boring and is more or less a departure from the P2P lending concept. It still will fund many loans, though.

While it would not make much sense to copy the workplace approach to platforms like Prosper, Zopa or Smava, it could easily be adapted by Kiva.