Lending Club has a new graphic displays on it’s statistic page. Prominently featured are loan purpose, range of investor returns and total loans funded. Users can click on any graphic to enlage it. I found the ‘Loan details’ page more interesting then the ‘Highlights’ page, for it visualizes differences in trends depending on loan purpose.
Signup Bonus
New lenders signing up at Lending Club via this link get 25 US$ to lend.
Vittana (sea earlier coverage ‘Education microfinance – Vittana funds students worldwide via p2p lending‘) has published the following video, where students that got loans through Vittana tell their story.
Currently Vittana lists 11 open loan listings.
Live from the Kiva Conference Call:
Financial startups have formed the ‘Coalition for new Credit Models’. Among the founding enterprises are Prosper and Loanio. Two of the changes the coalition asks Congress and the Administration to make are:
Adopt legislation classifying person-to-person lending as a consumer banking service, not a securities offering.
Create a Start Up Liaison at Treasury Department or within banking regulators to guide and fast-track the development of new financial products by start-up companies and organizations seeking to innovate the way consumers and businesses raise and access capital.
(Source: press release; photo credit: Vince Alongi)
Bankless-Life.at was launched as the first p2p lending service in Austria by the non-profit association “Von Menschen für Menschen” (engl. by humans for humans). The members-only site (membership fee is 60 Euro per year) allows borrowers with a given minimum credit score and a minimum income requirement of 1,000 EUR per month to apply for loans between 1,000 and 30,000 EUR. The wanted interest rate is set by the borrower, selectable loan terms are 12, 24, 36, 48 or 60 months.
Lenders are charged 3 Euro per bid. The fees for borrowers are rather high: In addition to the membership fee borrowers pay 0.5% to 2.5% (depending on term) origination fee, 0.8% tax plus 2% premium of the loan amount for the Anleger-Pool, which is a mechanism similar to the one used by German Smava spreading default loss risks among lenders.
According to chairman Siegfried Fischer Bankless Life has 1,800 members two weeks after launch.
The German blog P2P-Kredite.com has more details in yesterday’s article ‘Bankless- Life startet P2P-Kredite.com Österreich‘.
Lenders at MyC4.com do not have an easy task, when trying to check which of their loans are late on the repayments. The account page does not offer a comprehensive overview page. If a lender really wanted to check in detail he has to click through to the detail page of each loan he invested into.
Officially only one loan has the status ‘defaulted’ so far. However MyC4 so far has no standard policy when a late loan is to be declared defaulted. MyC4 has stated that there will be a default policy by the end of August.
Researching the situation, there are more than 320 loans that are late (fully or partly) with at least one repayment. Of these 72 loans are 3 payments late, 64 loans are 4 payments late, 30 are 5 payments late and 22 are 6 or more payments late.
Another issue that raised some concerns are the first impacts of the changed rules regarding currency risks.
… as some of you might have noticed already the first repayments are now posted on the investors accounts from Kenian investments where we investors are now taking the risk of currency fluctuations.
Within the first period from disbursement to the first repayment the KES has devalued from 97 to 104.5 = 7.2% already. … (Source: see discussion here)
To help lenders selecting loans to invest in, a column with the information whether a loan open for bidding is issued in local currency or in Euro was added to the wiseclerk MyC4 statistic pages.
(Source: uses information from Status der … MyC4 Kredite)