Other Companies
The State of Peer-to-Peer Student Loans
After Prosper.com and Lending Club made a splash in the lending world with peer-to-peer loans, a second generation of peer-to-peer lending companies emerged that specifically aimed at providing financing for college education. These companies launched in 2007 and 2008 with the aim of providing an affordable alternative to expensive private student loans using funds from [...]
Madiston PLC to Launch New U.K Peer-to-Peer Lending Site “LendLoanInvest”
Madison PLC will be soon launching a peer-to-peer lending site in the United Kingdom. The site will operate under the name “Lend Loan Invest” and will make use of the domain, LendLoanInvest.Co.Uk. Madison PLC has not announced when it’s planning to launch its new peer to peer lending service, but says on its corporate website [...]
LendStreet to Offer Peer to Peer Debt Restructuring Service
LendStreet will be launching a peer to peer lending service in the fall of 2011 that aims to help distressed borrowers restructure their debt. Prosper and Lending Club work with borrowers with 640 credit scores or better. In the early days of peer to peer lending, borrowers with lower credit scores were allowed to take [...]
MicroVentures Melds Venture Capital and Peer to Peer Lending
MicroVentures Marketplace has launched a new service that aims to bring concepts from peer to peer lending into the world of venture capital. The company allows businesses in a number of sectors to raise funding from individual investors on its platform. Businesses looking to receive funding pay a $100 preliminary application fee. If MicroVentures approves [...]
YES-Secure Offering Low Cost Fixed-Rate Peer-To-Peer Loans In UK
If UK borrowers are looking for an alternative to obtaining a personal loan through traditional financial institutions, they have a new option in YES-secure. YES-secure is geared towards consumers that are interested in obtaining an unsecured loan through social lending, also known as peer-to-peer lending, person-to-person lending, and P2P lending. The company offers these loans [...]
French P2P Lender Friendsclear Temporarily Suspends Operations
Friendsclear, a French peer to peer lending company, has temporarily halted operations citing regulatory issues. The Bank of France has requested changes in the operating procedures of Friendsclear and its banking partner Credit Agricole. The company will not be funding any new loans until its regulatory issues are cleared up. Friendsclear anticipates that it will [...]
Friendsurance Launches Peer to Peer Insurance Concept in Germany
Friendsurance, based in Germany, recently launched a new form of insurance coverage in which policy holders spread risk out between friends and family. The company hopes to do for insurance what peer-to-peer lending did for the loan industry. Companies like Prosper.com, CommunityLend and Lending Club and setup marketplaces so that consumers could make loans directly [...]
Asheesh Advani Steps Out of Virgin Money – Or Was He Pushed Out?
Before Richard Branson decided that P2P loans were the cola of the new millennium, Asheesh Advani was an entrepreneur who wanted to make it easier for people to borrow money from their friends and family. After a stint at the World Bank, he wondered if he could improve direct lending between individuals, and launched CircleLending [...]
IOU Central Files S-1 with SEC
On May 13, erstwhile Canadian P2P lender IOU Central filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. SEC to issue $225 million in “borrower payment dependent notes”. As their VP of Marketing stated in an interview back in March, IOU Central has decided to focus on the American P2P lending market, after being shut down [...]
MicroPlace Advertising 6% Returns Heavily
It’s hard to read TechCrunch anymore without seeing MicroPlace ads claiming you can earn up to 6% on your money. The microlending outfit backed by eBay launched 18 months ago as the first online microfinance platform that provided a return to investors, and has gradually brought on higher and higher-yielding partners over time. Initial returns were in [...]
Pertuity Direct Lends $500K in First Two Months
Two months after their official launch, Pertuity Direct has issued a press release stating that they have enabled $500,000 in new loans to consumers. Other statistics provided include: 70% of interested users follow through to open an account The average FICO score is 740 for approved borrowers The average loan size is $9,800 How does [...]
Interview with IOU Central’s VP Marketing, Barry Coleman
After realizing that IOU Central is planning a launch in the United States, I reached out to Barry Coleman, the VP of Marketing for IOU Central to ask a few questions about their plans. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at IOU [...]
Is IOU Central Planning a US Site?
IOU Central, the flash-in-a-pan P2P lending site from Canada that launched on Feb 13, 2008 and was promptly shut down on Feb 29 by Canadian regulators, has a message on the IOUCentral.com site (which is different than the IOUCentral.ca site they have used in the past) saying that they are filing with the SEC of [...]
Smava raises fees, annoys customers
A few days ago, German P2P lending site Smava announced that they were raising fees on borrowers and lenders. Among the 29 comments on their blog post, most are negative. The critics are primarily lenders bemoaning how steep the fee changes are, and whether the increased borrower fee will actually prevent borrowers from taking loans. [...]
Pertuity Direct Launches Mutual Fund-like P2P Lending
In a press release today, peer to peer lending site Pertuity Direct took the “beta” label off their site and started accepting new borrowers and lenders. Pertuity Direct‘s tagline is “mutually responsible banking”, and the “mutual” part of that tagline hints at their method. Rather than having lenders choose the borrowers they wish to finance, [...]
IOU Central Suspends Lending Activity in Canada
Only a few weeks after launching their web site, IOU Central shut down their web site on February 29 in response to a request from securities regulators in Quebec. A statement on the IOU Central site states: “IOU Central is now operating with limited functionality while we resolve a regulatory matter.” However, only a few [...]
eBay MicroPlace Launches
MicroPlace, eBay‘s answer to Kiva, launched today. Through MicroPlace, investors can make microloans to the working poor in developing nations around the world. Rather than choosing borrowers directly (as lenders on Kiva do), MicroPlace investors buy securities (complete with a prospectus) for a microfinance institution (MFI) which makes the loan to the borrowers. MicroPlace lets [...]
eBay’s MicroPlace Readies for Launch
MicroPlace, a US-to-developing world P2P lending platform (somewhat like Kiva) is scheduled to launch some time this fall, possibly as early as September. MicroPlace will let Americans with as little as $100 make a low-interest loan to an entrepreneur in a developing nation through a microfinance institution. The big difference between MicroPlace and Kiva, which launched [...]
Virgin Money USA acquires CircleLending, enters US banking market
CircleLending, the Massachusets-based facilitator of P2P loans, announced on May 15 that Virgin USA, the North American investment arm of Virgin (the UK-based Richard Branson company) had acquired a majority stake. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. CircleLending hasn’t been included in the discussion here in the past because, although they do facilitate loans between people, they [...]
Booberwatch gives Boober an ecosystem
Booberwatch, a data site that provides lending stats for Dutch P2P lending siteBoober, launched recently. My Dutch is a little roestig (rusty), but Booberwatch is a great-looking site with lots of interesting data, and includes a reasonably active forum (for a site that’s one week old, it has 50 registered users) and some polls. The amount [...]
Yes, P2P lending is growing everywhere. In the UK sites like Zopa, YES-secure are fast chasing the banks. 
The performance of p2p lending is increasing day by day due to its hard work and dedication towards work.I liked ...