3rd party services

LendingRobot Adds Functionality to Invest into FundingCircle US loans

wiseclerk

3rd party service LendingRobot today announces a partnership with Funding Circle in the United States, expanding the reach of LendingRobot’s automated investment technology beyond consumer loans and into small business lending.

Through the integration, individual investors using LendingRobot can set automated investment strategies for Funding Circle’s marketplace based on an extensive set of loan filtering criteria, and leverage the unified platform to manage their investments across multiple marketplaces, including Funding Circle.

“Introducing Funding Circle to the LendingRobot family of platforms demonstrates that our algorithmic investment strategies are extensible beyond consumer credit,” said LendingRobot CEO Emmanuel Marot. “The growth of peer lending as an investment vehicle is naturally encouraging an increase in the number and size of focused, vertical marketplaces. What we are building with this partnership is a unified view of all the major aspects of peer lending for investors, …”. Continue reading →

Gimmick – App for P2P Lenders

wiseclerk 1 Comment

I just saw the first iPhone App that is to support lenders in using p2p lending services. It aims to help them keeping up to date with the latest listings at Prosper, Lending Club and Kiva.

The features of this app are rather basic, but with the number of people lending at p2p services there could be a market for a sophisticated app that really helps lenders select loans while on the move.

Update: There are in fact two other free apps to browse Kiva loan listings.

Which sites do offer p2p lending statistics?

wiseclerk

When analysing numbers on p2p lending activity, users can rely on independent third party sites gathering statistics for many p2p lending services. These services either obtain the raw data via an interface provided by the service or they do parse the web pages of the service to collect the data.

Most of the statistic sites offer reports and tools to analyse and graph the overall development of the marketplace as well as the status of an individual lender’s investments.

The majority of the users are lenders, as the borrower usually needs the information only once – before applying for a loan – to determine what interest rate is appropriate.

Tools for Prosper:

Tools for Lending Club:

Tools for MyC4:

Tools for Zopa UK:

Tools for Smava:

Tools for Auxmoney:

Tools for Boober NL:

Feel free to copy this list, but please do set a link citing this page as source. If you know another social lending / p2p lending stats site, please let me know.

Long term readers may remember that the Wiseclerk.com domain initially started as a report site on Prosper.com. It was in fact together with Savagenumber.com the first service of this kind.

(Photo credit: ArtemFinland)

Kiva plans developer program – 3rd party apps

wiseclerk

Just a short heads up: Kiva plans a developer program allowing 3rd party applications to use data from the Kiva (lender) pages.

We’ve been working hard over the past few months to create a developer program at Kiva. This will be a place online where software engineers can get creative with Kiva and build applications that use Kiva in new ways. Perhaps someone will build a spiffy new tool to help you make a loan on your iPhone, or a text messaging service that notifies you when loans from your favorite country are available. A Facebook application that helps you keep up with new journals from your loans and share them with friends would be handy too.

Checking on MyC4 late loans

wiseclerk 1 Comment

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)