| By Jim Bruene on December 18, 2007 11:41 AM | Comments (1) |
For much of the past four or five weeks I've been researching and testing person-to-person lending sites. I've become a lender and have gone through the borrowing process at all three major U.S. P2P lending exchanges: Prosper, Zopa, and Lending Club. Plus I set up friends and family with loans at Virgin Money USA and LoanBack.
It was all part of the research process for the latest Online Banking Report entitled, Person-to-Person Lending 2.0: Disruptive service or market niche? That report is now available at our main website (here).*
I had originally intended on publishing it in early December. But as I was trying to wrap things up, Zopa launched its new U.S unit. So I stopped the presses and added an analysis of its unique model. Then as I was finishing that, Lending Club made a significant change last week, becoming a national lender instead of state-sanctioned one. That too is now in the report.
Here's a summary of the major fourth quarter activity in the person-to-person lending sector:
- Oct. 2: Prosper overhauled a number of its lending tools, which were announced at our FINOVATE conference Oct. 2 (video here)
- Oct. 6: Virgin Money (formerly CircleLending) launched its revamped friends-and-family service with a splashy debut in Boston with Virgin founder Richard Branson leading the parade (coverage here)
- Dec. 3: Zopa launched its U.S. version, an entirely new way of looking at the P2P space (coverage here)
- Dec. 13: Lending Club went national in a unique partnership with WebBank
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*Subscribers may download the report free of charge.
Others may purchase it as an individual report.
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Some P2P communities host discussion boards that seem to encourage what appear to be strong "phishing clubs". I saw that some P2P companies have not put up boards at all.
This seems to be a weak spot for P2P investing. The community model can be attractive to smaller investors as well as weaker borrowers because it is a dynamic and inexpensive marketting tool, but if there is no protective coating around the smaller players when the phishers and poachers cruise in, how can they survive?
I mean, with $1,000 to play with, if I throw it into day-trading at least I'm not risking my business and everything else to the kind of libel and character assasination I have seen happen in poorly-moderated boards.