| By Jim Bruene on March 21, 2007 4:14 PM | Comments (5) |
Since publishing the first third-party research on so-called person-to-person, or social, lending, last year (link to report here), we've heard from entrepreneurs around the globe looking to replicate the model in their country. Most are still operating in stealth mode, but one has recently lifted the veil just a bit, with a placeholder website and email announcement list (see screenshot below). It's called CommunityLend, <communitylend.com> and it's targeting the Canadian market.
There's not much detail on CommunityLend site, but the startup already has 50+ Google links, many stemming from a brief mention in a March 9 Finextra article (here). The Founder and President is Michel Garrity, previously VP Marketing & Sales at ePost. Others on the team, at least in advisory roles, are ex-Bank of Montreal exec and BankWatch blogger Colin Henderson and John Philip Green (profile here), currently Director of Engineering at Affinity Labs and Co-Founder of of Savvica and Rapleaf. Development efforts are spearheaded by a Toronto-based Ruby on Rails shop, Unspace.
It looks like an innovative group and it will be interesting to see how they approach the social lending market. We'll keep you posted as the company moves towards its fall 2007 launch goal.
Contact: info@communitylend.com
There is also www.p2ploans.ca for canadiens social lending..
It looks like they have a good team indeed.
I can't wait to check the platform, and see what their key differentiators are: Zopa and Prosper are already doing well, and those two sites benefit from respectively over two and one year of experience in Social Lending: they both have a dynamic and committed community.
CommunityLend will probably do very well in Canada, but I am not sure how successful they will be outside the country... Currently, Prosper is the clear leader in the US, and Zopa will enter the US market very soon...
Jim, Thanks for the update and for covering the development side - I suspected it would be in Rails, so thanks for confirming that.
Even from the temporary homepage, you can tell they're cooking up some Web 2.0 goodness.
Trey, In my "deep" Google search on the company, it looks like you guys were the first to mention CommunityLend by name. Another first for OpenSourceCU!
OOOH, weird! You know I think I saw it off of Colin's LinkedIn page. Who says LinkedIn isn't valuable for something?! :)