Category

Our industry is beginning to be noticed in the traditional financial mainstream press. peer to peer lending |  www.ft.com What do you do when your bank’s gone away? Get by with a little help from your friends, naturally. Peer-to-peer lending – which lets friends and complete strangers lend small amounts of money to each other over the internet – has enjoyed a surge of interest in recent months as banks have cut back

Interesting interview with Tadatoshi Senoo, CEO of Maneo – a social lending company in Japan. He worked with MUFJ, the largest bank is Japan, and afterwards decided to set off on this venture.  The interview focusses on the hardships of setting up such a company.  Social lending takes root in Japan | Japan Today What does the company offer? Our company provides an online social network for individual borrow

Niall Ferguson [Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the author of The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West.] offers analysis and conclusions on the world of financial services, and the historic lead up to the current financial crisis.  Wall Street Lays Another Egg | Vanity Fair The author c

Here is a link to a recent thought-provoking article from VentureBeat journalist, Chris Morrison, entitled "Will "social capital" be the next big industry to emerge?" His central example in the piece is the emerging field of "Microcredit" and specifically the work of Nobel Prize winning Mohamed Yunus.  I especially like Morrison’s quote on this defining nature of the success o

We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak and provide a demo of our lending system a the SIT annual user conference in Markham yesterday.  The audience comprised a broad group of banks, credit unions, and technology providers. Patrick Lannigan who organised the event introduced us following an overview of their strategy. Then on to our presentation … and live system demo … Technorati

  It’s been a strange month for the financial services industry as a whole and the burgeoning industry of Social Lending is no exception. These last few weeks have seen  a number of major announcements in the Social Lending space including the following: - Zopa US announced that it has restructured its operation in the US in collaboration  with their credit union partners. - LendingClub announced it is reopening its

Lending Club have come out of their quiet period with an astounding announcement for themselves and social lending.  Lendingclub blog Today, we’re delighted to announce that we have completed this process and are now available to both borrowers and lenders. We believe that this SEC registration is a major step forward for the Lending Club community and social lending in general, as it helps establish the space a

It is a little sad that we see Zopa US close shop apparently following the participating Credit Unions inability to adequately fund the loans.  We had always known the US Zopa was an entirely different model, with the Credit Unions being the sole lenders, and then the credit crisis came along.  Nonetheless we will miss them. Zopa US So while our model is doing very well in current market conditions, the US

In reading this piece by Joseph Stiglitz at CNN, he speaks of the causes of the crisis in banking.  In particular there is this little gem; CNN:  How to prevent the next Wall Street crisis The new “innovations” simply hid the extent of systemic leverage and made the risks less transparent; it is these innovations that have made this collapse so much more dramatic than earlier financial crises. B

In their latest edition of Retail Banking Insider, Jane Cooper at Lafferty has a piece entitled ‘Credit Crunch a boon to social lending’. We are mentioned and quoted in the along with Zopa and Prosper. The themes are: banks have increased their pricing banks have cut back lending lenders [investors] are seeking alternative vehicles with better and predictable returns good quality borrowers with better cre