Trustbuddy AB has acquired the operations of Swedish p2p lending site Loanland effective November 19th. This means that Loanland will not close as reported earlier. Trustbuddy AB is a Swedish company with Norwegian origins. Trustbuddy will continue operations and in mid-term plans to integrate the activities of the service into their own platform. Loanland users were informed that the transfer of the membership agreements does not change anything for them.
Loanland launched last December as the first p2p lending company in the swedish market (see ‘Loanland launches peer to peer lending in Sweden‘). Since then about 5.7 million SEK (approx. 0.75 million US$) loan volume has been funded .
Ville Vesterinen has published more information about Loanland in the ArcticStartup blog:
The company is currently providing unsecured loans to the Swedish market. The Swedish market for unsecured loans to households amount to around 160 billion SEK (around 16 billion EUR or 20 billion USD) at present and with unsecured loans to SMEs the figure is about 500 billion SEK (around 50 billion EUR or 63 billion USD). The market has grown 15% annually during the last few years. … Loanland is using an open source platform that it has developed, automating most of the processes. The technology is based on Java, J2EE, MySQL, Tomcat, Spring and Hibernate. The platform and auction engine allows individual and automatic bidding, electronic signatures, integrated credit scoring and efficient payments.
The company … has already over 10 000 members and 5 000 registered borrowers and lenders. They have 6 million SEK (600K EUR or 750K USD) deposited out of which 95 percent is lend out as loans. Quite significant number considering that the startup operates currently only in Sweden.
P2P lending is spreading internationally. While the biggest loan volumes are generated in the US market, many p2p lending websites have been established in other international markets.
social lending services enabling micro financing (e.g. Kiva, MyC4) – participants driven mainly by social motives
other concepts (e.g. Virginmoney which is special in the way that it does not do the matchmaking between borrowers and lenders, but supports the process between persons that already had offline relations- slogan “We manage loans between family and friends“)
Sites funding student loans can fall into any of these three categories or combine motivations.
P2P-Banking.com has created the following overview table listing services that are in operation and ranked them by loan volume. The loan volumes are not directly comparable for they are cumulative since launch of each service and represent different time spans.
Asked for a figure, a Microplace spokesman pointed out “…it is important to note that MicroPlace is not a P2P site. We are a platform that offers investments to the retail public.“. No loan volume was quoted, but he stated “investments purchased on our site have enabled over 26,000 microfinance loans.”
In total approx. 685 million US$ have been funded through peer to peer lending/social lending services so far worldwide.
This image may be reprinted on other internet sites, provided it is not altered or resized and the following text (including the direct link to this article) is given as source directly below the image: Source: P2P-banking.com
If you are a representative of a p2p lending service and want your service to be included in the next update of this table, please send me an email with information about your company.
Loanland.se is the first Swedish p2p lending service. Founder Daniel Kaplan, who in 2006 headed the successful sale of Swedish auction site Tradera to Ebay for 48 million US$, sees a great potential for peer to peer lending in Sweden.
At Loanland, borrowers with the best credit grade can borrow up to 300,000 SEK (approx 45,000 US$), while borrowers with the lowest admitted credit grade can borrow up to 3,000 SEK (approx 450 US$). But borrowers are able to achieve a better credit rating by paying back on time and then can later borrow a larger amount, says Kaplan.
As of today the site had 4 loan listings with interest rates between 4 and 14 percent. Minimum bis seems to be 250 SEK (38 US$). Loan term seems to be customizable as 3 of the current listings are for 3 years and one is for 1 month.
Loanland is backed by experienced entrepreneurs. Aside Kaplan there are Mary Groschopp, before at OMX, Peter Nordlander, founder of Avanza, Peter Settman, founder of Baluba.
If you use Loanland please share your experiences in the wiseclerk forum.
