Just a short heads up: Kivaplans a developer program allowing 3rd party applications to use data from the Kiva (lender) pages.
We’ve been working hard over the past few months to create a developer program at Kiva. This will be a place online where software engineers can get creative with Kiva and build applications that use Kiva in new ways. Perhaps someone will build a spiffy new tool to help you make a loan on your iPhone, or a text messaging service that notifies you when loans from your favorite country are available. A Facebook application that helps you keep up with new journals from your loans and share them with friends would be handy too.
In this post Netbanker questions, if MyC4 and Kiva are offering p2p lending. He argues they are “not really peer-to-peer”.
Let’s have a look, if these microfinance models can fit under the definition of peer to peer lending. One aspect of p2p lending is, that the lender can select individual borrowers, which he wants to lend money to. Kiva and MyC4 offer this choice. A p2p lending platform usually allows search parameters to narrow the search for matching borrowers (e.g. by credit grade). Both have this function allowing to search by country, gender, industry and more.
A possible argument against classifying MyC4 and Kiva as p2p lending companies is the fact that they use local microfinance institutions as intermediaries acting between lender and borrower and charging fees. That is true, but several other p2p lending services (e.g. Prosper, Lending Club and Smava) use banks as intermediaries (for legal reasons).
So where exactly is the divide seperating MyC4 and Kiva from other p2p lending services. They differ especially on the factor that:
Borrowers can not sign up themselves (so one side is really offline); borrowers are selected and screened by the MFIs
Business model
Lenders receive no interest at Kiva
Lenders and borrowers do not reside in the same country.
I still think that MyC4 and Kiva can be defined as p2p lending services. With Microplace the case is different, because no individual borrowers can be identified; therefore Microplace could be excluded form p2p lending (Microplace states that it is not a p2p lending site).
Kiva announced a new policy regarding inactive accounts:
So, later this month, we’ll be rolling out a new policy where credit that has been inactive for 12 months will turn into a donation to Kiva. This way, the funds will be put to use helping Kiva fulfill our philanthropic mission, and affected lenders will receive something of value – a tax receipt for a charitable donation.
Kiva says most lenders will not be affected, because lenders with active loans or those who logged in or received a repayment within the last 12 months are not inactive.
Update Dec, 13th: Long discussion by lenders about the proposed change here.
Kiva today has reached the milestone of 50 million US$, doubling the loan volume in the last 8 months. I have been lending on Kiva for nearly 2 years now and so far all of my borrowers have repaid me (unlike my MyC4 borrowers). Kiva is doing a very good job in keeping defaults low.
1 loan every 32 seconds
The current – impressive – statistics for Kiva are:
Total value of all loans made through Kiva:
$50,023,035
Number of Kiva Lenders:
363,222
Number of loans that have been funded through Kiva:
70,357
Percentage of Kiva loans which have been made to women entrepreneurs:
77.96%
Number of Kiva Field Partners (microfinance institutions Kiva partners with):
93
Number of countries Kiva Field Partners are located in:
42
Current repayment rate (all partners):
98.76%
Current default rate (all partners):
1.24%
Average size of loan for funding:
$449.02
Average total amount loaned per Kiva Lender (includes reloaned funds):
$137.81
Average number of loans per Kiva Lender:
3.70
The growth is stimulated by a large, active supporter base, that comes up with creative marketing ideas. Did you know that you can build a beard to support Kiva?
Social lending site Kiva.org celebrates it’s third anniversary. In this time Kiva loans with a volume of approximately 45 million US$ 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.
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.
