p2c lending

390,000 US$ P2P Loan Funded via Rebirth Financial

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Rebirth Financial announced that it facilitated a 390,000 US$ loan via it’s social lending platform to NOLA Brewing Company. You can read more about NOLA Brewing company here.

The press release says: “In the case of NOLA Brewing, Rebirth Financial matched the loan to ASI Federal Credit Union in less than one week. ‘Rebirth’s process was quick, easy, and helped us raise the necessary funding to can our beer,’ said Dylan Lintern, Vice President of NOLA Brewing Company.“.

If I read this right and the loan was funded by just one institutional lender you can hardly file this under Rebirth Financial’s claim “Rebirth Financial Inc. debuted America’s first person-to-business lending platform … in February. It allows people to lend small sums of money to small businesses in their community.“. I wrote to the founder Chonchol Gupta who replied: “This loan started as a p2p loan but was fully funded by the credit union, who would not have seen the loan or perhaps given thought to it, if it was not for the groundswell of community interest. Banks see it as great PR to fund loans important to the community.“

Fundingcircle Raises £2.5 Million Funding From Index Ventures

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British Fundingcircle.com has announced the closing of £2.5m of Series A financing from Index Ventures, co-investors and existing shareholders.

Since Funding Circle launched in August 2010, more than 4,000 businesses and savers have signed up, with 11.5 million GBP offered to businesses to date. Currently, lenders have collectively earned 120,000 GBP in interest with average yields of 8.3% with access to their funds through Funding Circle’s secondary market. fee from lenders and 2% fee from borrowers. Yield is calculated before fees, tax deductions and bad debt. To date, no businesses have defaulted on loans and therefore no bad debt has been incurred by any lender.

Samir Desai, co-founder of Funding Circle, said: “We are delighted to welcome such a prominent and well respected investor as Index Ventures as a shareholder in Funding Circle.”

Rebirth Financial – P2C Lending to Businesses in Louisiana

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Chonchol Gupta and Xavier Cabo, two graduates of the Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business, founded RebirthFinancial.com to enable small businesses from Louisiana easier access to loans.

Interested businesses are screened and once approved can apply for loans between 5,000 and 100,000 US$ with loan terms ranging from 5,000 to 100,000. There is only a small fee of 100 US$. Apart from that fee, the business model of Rebirth Financial bases on earning from the interest rate spread.

Any US resident can lend. Minimum amount is 50 US$. Rebirth Financial is not subject to SEC registration.

It will be very interesting to see how the first p2c lending service in the US develops. Funding Circle in the UK had a good start. Rebirth Financial has already announced that Louisiana is only the start and that they plan to expand nationwide.

Peter Renton over at SocialLending.net has an interesting long article reviewing the launch of RebirthFinancial.com, too.

Fundingcircle’s First Month Figures

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Fundingcircle.com launched on Friday August, 13th. According to figures the company released, the p2c lending service had a good start. Apparently many lenders took advantage of the cashback offer, and immediately after lending sold loan parts to other lenders on the secondary market. Review the following numbers reported by Funding Circle:

  • 11 small businesses have fully accepted loans from Funding Circle lenders totalling 317,000 GBP
  • Funded businesses range from environmental consultancies and recyclers, to restaurants and retailers, and manufacturing and engineering companies
  • Over 1,000 lenders and borrowers have joined
  • 20 loan requests from small businesses have been listed on Funding Circle, with a good number of businesses in the credit underwriting process
  • Monthly interest rates for borrowers range from 7.4% to 10.7%
  • ~10,000 bids have been placed on loan requests
  • ~500 loan parts have been successfully transferred from one lender to another

Funding Circle Raises 1.1M to do P2C Lending

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London based Funding Circle has announced that it has raised 1.1 million US$ form undisclosed private investors and will launch it’s p2c lending service Fundingcircle.com in Q2 2010.

Director and co-founder James Meekings informed P2P-Banking.com:

When the platform launches later this year, people will lend small amounts to a range of different, creditworthy businesses to spread their risk. In turn, those businesses will be borrowing from a multitude of people to get a lower interest rate. … Funding Circle will also empower people to support their local community, by allowing lenders to target businesses with characteristics, such as locale, that are valued by them.

Small businesses will initially be able to apply for unsecured loans of 5,000 to 50,000 GBP. The businesses are checked for fraud and must meet a number of minimum credit requirements verified by the UK’s leading credit agency. Experienced underwriters then further analyse and screen businesses before allowing them onto the Funding Circle platform.

B2B Loans Introduced at Isepankur

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IsePankur, the Estonian P2P banking site, this recently added three innovations to their platform:

  1. Loan auctions that end immediately when the loan request is 100 percent funded
  2. Business accounts enabling Business-to-Business, Consumer-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer lending and borrowing
  3. An arbitrage court that will be in charge of solving disagreements coming from the loans, incl. defaulting loans

isePankur decided to add a new auction type based on requests from the borrowers that allows the borrower to choose if the auctions ends after a set time period or when its fulfilled 100 per cent. The borrowers currently have an alternative to borrow from banks, pay-day loan companies or isePankur. The two former institutions provide the loan to the customer with-in 1 to 3 days from the application. Hence some of customers asked to implement a system by which they would be able to choose between a quick financing or a low interest rate in order for them to be more willing to use the peer-to-peer platform.

isePankur also launched an important new feature allowing legal entities to register, lend and borrow on the site. The maximum loan amounts (only for companies) have been increased to 150,000 EEK (approx. 13,175 US$), approx 15 times higher than the loan limit for individuals. There were three major reasons for the addition: (a) small companies lack financing opportunities as the banks have stopped providing credit whilst there are no official debt markets in Estonia; (b) companies with excess funds do not have simple investment opportunities that would provide them with returns of over 3-4 per cent per annum; and (c) there is a 0 per cent corporate tax in Estonia hence most of individuals with excess capital keep it in their companies’ accounts. isePankur aims to increase the loan volumes on the site multi-fold after the public and companies have had enough time to get familiar with the benefits provided by the business services.

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