P2P Lending News

Nearly three years after starting to build out what they hoped would be the first social lending company in Canada, CommunityLend has finally launched for borrowers and lenders in the Canadian province of Ontario. Despite having a lot of the technical pieces in place for years, CommunityLend’s launch was continually delayed for regulatory reasons. Now that CommunityLend is licensed and registered in Ontario as a Portfolio Manager and Exempt Market Dealer, the site is available for borrowing and lending.

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The spartan home page on Virgin Money’s web site reads: “Everyone’s better off with simplicity in a complex world”. This is apparently the strategy Virgin Money is pursuing with their American business, as they seem to have dropped their loan servicing, student loan, direct mortgage, and mortgage licensing products from the site entirely.

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American P2P lending service Prosper announced on their blog today that they had received a new round of “investment” from Nigel Morris of QED Investors, the founder of CapitalOne. This investment is much different than the previous $40 million in equity financing that the P2P lender has taken in the past, since this is a 1-year, 15% loan.

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P2P Lender Prosper announced today that they are now welcoming lenders from Florida. Florida is the fourth most populous state in the U.S., which adds 6% of the population to Prosper’s addressable market. Along with recent announcements opening Rhode Island and Virginia, Prosper is now available to 54.1% of the U.S. population. Rival social lending site Lending Club also announced recently that they were open to Missouri lenders, adding 1.9% of the population, for a grand total of 54.3% of the population.

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Correction: The initial post stating that the Bank of Italy reneged on their agreement with Zopa was inaccurate. Thanks to the Zopa Italy team for clarifying things. A corrected post is shown below.

In an update on their blog today, Italian P2P lender Zopa Italia has announced that the site will not relaunch until October or later. Zopa has been working on the establishment of sub-accounts for lenders as part of an agreement with the Bank of Italy, and is pushing the relaunch date out now that they have more details on the technical integration issues involved.

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Prosper Lending Review broke the news this morning that Pertuity Direct seems to have ceased operations. Apparently a special meeting of the board of trustees of the National Retail Fund (the mutual fund that underlies Pertuity Direct’s investment vehicle) was convened “to approve the liquidation and distribution of all shares of the fund”.

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Some time yesterday, Lending Club passed the $50 million loan mark, showing yet again that they are a force to be reckoned with in the global P2P lending space. As of today, Lending Club has issued $50,435,050 across 5,764 loans, for an average of $8,750 per loan.

Lending Club continues to grow at a solid pace, and is on track to fund about $4.1 million in loans during August 2009, which would be an increase of 6% over the previous month. This also puts Lending Club at about 4x the monthly loan volume of their nearest competitor Prosper, who relaunched in July and will be completing their first full calendar month with around $1 million in loans funded. To date, Prosper’s aggregate loan volume of $180 million still dwarfs Lending Club’s progress.

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It started off innocently enough with a post on the Prosper blog entitled “All sorts of people looking for loans on Prosper.com“, featuring alongside a police officer and a desk jockey, a borrower wanting to buy a camcorder to “expand further in the adult entertainment industry”. I’m sorry… a what? Really?

Well, apparently, yes, the borrower really is an adult entertainment professional (later shortened to “porn star” in a followup post), and she really was requesting a second loan from Prosper. Her first loan for a candy vending business back in April 2008, can be found here.

So Prosper, newly relaunched under SEC oversight, and eager for a followup to their Twitter contest, jumped at the opportunity. We hooked a porn star! the all-porn star post seemed to shout. Authored under the pseudonym “Prosper Pink” (complete with Twitter account and Facebook page), Prosper tackled the feminine side of P2P lending, strutting across the wide line that separates financial services from pornography, and wondering aloud why they couldn’t get a little “financially sassy”.
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Last week, peer to peer lending platform Loanio filed an amendment to their original S-1 filing with the SEC. The original filing was made in late June, and the amendment is dated August 14, 2009. The filing is fairly ho-hum until Loanio discloses that they’ve made an arrangement to license their proprietary source code to another corporation.

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Today the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009 goes into effect. Although the changes included in this reform are good for consumers,  and eliminate some of the credit card industry’s most egregious practices, smart consumers shouldn’t finance their purchases by paying the interest to credit card companies at all.

Here are five reasons a personal loan from a peer-to-peer lending company are better than a credit card loan…
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