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I planned to blog in commiseration with Tom about being denied for a loan. Tom was denied for a Zopa loan and I was rejected for a GE Money Bank credit card through Amazon. GE Money Bank took 10 days to tell me that they could not verify my identity despite the promise on Amazon.com of a 30 second approval process. I have a 800 credit score and provided all information including a phone number and they could not verify my identity. They did not bother calling to verify and customer service told me the process is computer automated. Ten days for a computer program to return results? I doubt it…

Sorry /Rant Off
I’ll skip the remainder of my planned rant about Amazon’s relationship with GE Money Bank Read the rest of this entry »

Loanio has continued to claim be almost available since I started blogging on P2P lending. Loanio in fact has been promising its imminent release since before I started blogging P2P lending — back in November of 2008.

For about the past year (maybe more), Loanio has been requesting you to sign up for their email announcements to stay informed of their launch. It is likely that Lending Clubs SEC troubles have impacted Loanio and caused a delay, but why do they keep announcing they will be launching soon? Launch and then announce if you don’t know when you are launching.

Loanio has announced their own launch via email and announced the Read the rest of this entry »

I received a Prosper Marketplace update via email. There were several interesting items, but it the last item stood out:

Legal Agreement Revisions
A minor change has been made to the following legal agreements, to clarify that selling or buying a recommendation or endorsement is not allowed. Please refer to the links below to view these changes.
Borrower Registration Agreement [PDF]
Lender Registration Agreement [PDF]
Group Leader Registration Agreement [PDF]

This portion of the update seems to directly target Read the rest of this entry »

Lending Club just sent an update via email about their latest filing with the SEC. Unfortunately, they are still in a quiet period so they do not say much about the ongoing outlook, but it seems they may be one step closer to completing the requirements to return to P2P lending. So maybe Lending Club will survive.

The filing was posted to the SEC website at 5:30 PM eastern time toiday (Friday June 20th) and I am writing this less than an hour later.

Link to the Lending Club filings documents. I have not had the chance to read through the whole filing yet but I did Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to Lending Club for winning a Webby Award. Other recipients included David Byrne, will.i.am of the Blackeyed Peas, Stephen Colbert, Lorne Michaels, Michel Gondry, and Tim and Eric. Many, many other organizations won awards including the Peace Corps which won a Webby award for a government website.

Lending Cub gave a tongue-in-cheek acceptance speech for their 2008 Webby award, but it seems to have been the only words available to a company under the a SEC imposed quiet period. That is the speech was completely silent: Read the rest of this entry »

Due to the Lending Club quiet period, the Lending Club referral program has ended. The program was a good one — I earned over $300 in referral fees through this website by blogging about my experience creating a portfolio, creating a video, gathering advice for new lenders, the inception of the referral program and the Lending Club bonus program.

I hope that they bring back the referral program after the quiet period is over.

From the quiet period email sent out today:

Q2. What about referrals?
A2.1 The current referral program is terminated. If you have referred someone who has already signed up as a lender or a borrower, or if you have been referred by someone and have already signed up as a lender or a borrower, you will be receiving your referral payment within the next few days.

Technorati Tags: lending club, peer lending, p2p lending, affiliate programs, referral code

Photo credit: TheTim

Tom interviewed Chirag Chaman who is the CEO of the soon to be released new P2P lending site Fynanz which will focus on student loans. It seems like a small niche since there are already governemnt backed loans in this category and the rates are rather reasonable at banks. However, with the price of tuition continually out pacing inflation and standard loan sizes, this may be a niche worth pursuing.

I found the answer to the following question interesting Read the rest of this entry »

Lending Club is offering a 5% ROI bonus in the form of a “Thank you!” to investors who lend more than $5,000 before February 3rd 2008. If you lend $5,000 before the deadline, you will receive a bonus of $250! If you use my Lending Club Affiliate Link and open the account with $1,000 initially, you will receive an additional bonus of $50! That will add up to an extra 1% to your P2P lending ROI. The best news is that the more you loan, the more bonus you will receive, so if you loan a total of $10,000 before the deadline, you will receive a $500 bonus payout. Even better you can take the bonus out in cash or reinvest it at Lending Club.

How would the Bonus Impact your Lending ROI? Read the rest of this entry »

Zopa, the P2P Lending company from the UK has now opened its virtual doors in the United States. Zopa has been providing a P2P marketplace in Italy and the UK for some time now. The rates that they are offering to borrowers (currently starting at 8.75%) for unsecured loans are quite low and can go as low as nothing with help. The rates provided to lenders, although greater than a government CD, are not outstanding, but Zopa’s differentiating factor from other P2P lending sites is that Zopa loans are guaranteed.

To summarize and simplify Zopa’s somewhat complex model, let me walk you through the steps as a lender — How Zopa Works:

1. Register and open an account with one of the member credit unions.
2. Lend money to the credit union at a flat and guaranteed rate which is higher than a CD, but is also backed by the FDIC up to $100,000.
3. You pick a small portion of your return (called help) and give to a particular borrower(s) to lower the borrower’s monthly payments.

So again it is a guaranteed flat rate of return which is greater than a 1 year CD, unless you choose to lower the return to give the difference away. The return is less than you might earn with Prosper or Lending Club, but you do not take on the credit risk, so your principle is not at risk. You are lending money to the bank and not directly to the individual in this case. So to inject the P2P aspect of the lending, Zopa allows you to give away a bit of the differential between the rate at which they loan out the money and interest that they are paying you. So if you loan Zopa, er, rather the credit union via Zopa, lots of money, you can discount the rate at which your uncle, bother, or sister (or the girl who has a cute picture — and I expect to see lots of attractive pictures posted at Zopa) borrows money by you giving the borrower a bit of the return to lower their payment. According to the marketing material, everyone wins. Well, as long as the lender is happy tying up their money for a full year at rates just slightly higher than a government bond - or less than government bond if the lender prefers to give more juice to borrowers. And of course Zopa wins who takes no risk on the transaction since Zopa is actually a middle man between the credit unions and the individuals.

The True Irony of Zopa

Did you catch that last bit? My review of Zopa is that it is ironic that a web 2.0 P2P lending site is actually serving as middle man between borrower and bank and lender and bank. Zopa has injected themselves into the middle of a transaction that you could have more directly entered. Very ironic, but at least they do seem to offer good rates and an interesting concept.

Update: Zopa Borrowers Receiving Negative Interest Rates on Loans

More than ironic… What is the point of using Zopa lending to a relative? If your purpose is to gift a relative some money by lowering their rate by lending your money at less than the going rate, might I suggest you simply gift the relative some money instead and cut out the middle man?

Read the rest of this entry »

I recieved my informational email from Zopa announcing that they are in the testing phase. Zopa is promising to be different than the existing Person to Person lending sites such as Prosper.com and Lending Club in some interesting ways:

• No risk for investors.
  Your funds will be federally insured. No more worrying about whether your borrowers will pay your loan back.
• Pick who you want to help.
  Investors will choose exactly who they want to help.
• Set your rate.
  Investors will choose how much they want to earn, up to a ceiling.
• No waiting.
  Borrowers will get their loans immediately upon approval.
  Lower your monthly payment.
• Borrowers can actually reduce their loan payments after they’ve borrowed. They’ll do that using rich profiles…

How will we do all this? By using some very cool technology and a terrific partnership with leading credit unions. More coming soon! And we do mean soon…

I am very curious about how the federal insuance will work. I want more details on that. It seems like that will encourage reckless lending. “Rich Profiles” sounds like a great cconcept for borrowers but again I need more information to effectively evaluate this. The other two bullet points do not seem enough different to shift the market.

Zopa is also requesting potential borrowers sign up to assist with the testing phase.

We could use some borrowers to pound on the site, take out loans, and make sure all our bells and whistles are…ringing and whistling.

If you were thinking of borrowing on Zopa, have good credit (FICO 640+), and are a U.S. resident 18 or over, drop us a line:
questions@zopa.com

Edit: Zopa was mentioned in a WSJ article today and in the WSJ blogs where the comments are critical of Prosper.