Trend: People-to-People Lending

How it works? People who need money request it, with a listing of why they need the money, and some numbers describing their credit rating. Other people then bid for the privilege of lending money to them. The lower the interest rate offered by the lender, the more likely he is to win the bid.



http://www.prosper.com/ in USA
Prosper.com facilitates, in return for a one-time 1% fee from borrowers, and a 0.5% annual loan servicing fee from lenders. Prosper is backed by Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Ventures, and Omidyar Network, Prosper has raised approximately $20 million. Prosper's marketplace platform is patent pending.


http://www.zopa.com/ in UK
Zopa was started by a small cluster of very experienced money people including several members of the original Egg plc management team.

People-to-People Lending Redux

We did a feature back in March 2006 about Prosper.com. The first year results are in - suggesting that Prosper.com's revenues for 2006 were in the range of $300,000 - based upon a 1 per cent origination fee charged on almost $30 million of loans originated.

Obviously, they'll need to grow that revenue number by a couple of orders of magnitude for this person-to-person lending business to be considered economically viable.


via PaymentsNews