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Whatever it is, it DOES look sexy
LOL. That's a first, then! "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson
On the retail end, P2P banking isn't a new concept. Zopa has been on that one in the UK and California for about 10 years now with no major breakthrough. In fact, although demand for credit was healthy, they've got major problems raising capital from retail lenders. I probably wouldn't be long on this type of initiative.
All they do is move existing money around - Peer to Peer investment, maybe.
They launched in the UK in 2005, and I went to meet them about a year later when they said they were planning their US move.
Zopa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zopa launched in the US in partnership with six Credit Unions on December 4, 2007 but it closed to new business due to the US Government bailout of financial institutions on October 8, 2008.
Zopa charges borrowers a fee of £118.50 and lenders a 1% annual service fee. And that's it. There are no hidden charges, no additional costs, no sneaky clauses.
What Zopa say is this
Zopa blog - Banning PPI sales at credit point of sale is good for consumers
Interesting news today from the Competition Commission re PPI sales. We used to sell this product but stopped for 2 reasons: 1) we hardly sold any, probably because we simply made it available, with no real sales effort. That's not to say we didn't describe it properly but we didn't push it, or even worse leave the borrower with the impression it would mean they would be more likely to be granted a loan if they bought it. Sellers are really really not supposed to do this but I question how they get (or should I say used to get) such high conversion rates without doing so; 2) we discovered that the level of claims made by the borrowers under the policies we did sell was tiny, so we didn't consider the policy offered value for money.
Interesting news today from the Competition Commission re PPI sales. We used to sell this product but stopped for 2 reasons:
1) we hardly sold any, probably because we simply made it available, with no real sales effort. That's not to say we didn't describe it properly but we didn't push it, or even worse leave the borrower with the impression it would mean they would be more likely to be granted a loan if they bought it. Sellers are really really not supposed to do this but I question how they get (or should I say used to get) such high conversion rates without doing so;
2) we discovered that the level of claims made by the borrowers under the policies we did sell was tiny, so we didn't consider the policy offered value for money.
ie they used to sell PPI (but not much), which is in fact insurance sold to the borrower, not the lender, but of course in a P2P model should protect the lender, too.
But according to them, they stopped selling it for reasons given.
Where do you get your info re Zopa's revenue sources from? They've moved on their business model a bit, I suspect. "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson
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