Boober p2p lending service to reach 1 million Euro loan volume

4 month after the launch, Dutch p2p lending service boober.nl is approaching a total volume of 1 million Euro funded loans (chart shows development of loan volume since launch).

Boober loan volume

In comparision, German p2p lending service Smava.de, launched only 8 weeks after Boober is growing much slower. Currently it reached approx. 150000 Euro loan volume. Look forward for a post on the development of Smava in the near future.

Boober plans to launch in Belgium as next country. While not started yet, the domain boober.be is already up, saying "beta".

Prosper loan figures

Prosper loans have meanwhile surpassed 66 million dollars loan volume. A look at wiseclerk's prosper loan aging table shows that Prosper.com succeeds in increasing originating loan volume nearly every month. Currently new loans for about 8 million US$ originate each month.

However the figures also show an alarmingly high volume for late and defaulted loans. Especially when looking at older loans (the new ones do not have aged enough to be technically able to default). For example of 2.1 million dollar loan value that originated in June last year, $177,000 loan value has defaulted and another $105,000 are 3 or more months late. The default rate for loans from June 2006 will therefore be well above 10 percent at the end of the 36 month term. And this is no execption. For March and April 2006 defaults are already higher than 10 percent of originating loan value.

prosper loan aging

Zopa prepares launch in Italy

Actually Zopa.it is not run by the British Zopa Ltd. but by the franchise “P2P s.r.l” with offices in Milano. The company has licensed the use of the brand and the technology for Italy. Zopa.it will allow Italians to borrow up to 40000 Euro (roughly $55000), which is a high amount, compared to p2p services in other countries.

The company was created by Nova partners, Milan, together with New College Capital Ltd.

It is possible to pre-register on Zopa.it to be notified at launch time.

Sources(1, 2, 3,  and own research)

Correction and Update: I must excuse myself to have confused the CEO of Zopa Italy with another Italian banker with identical name. As Carlo of Zopa Italy pointed out in a comment to this post: “Zopa Italy’s Ceo is Maurizio Pietro Sella, not Maurizio Sella. Maurizio Pietro started is working career with Banco di Santo Spirito (Capitalia Group), then joined in 1990 Citibank, where he had several assignements (mainly in London and Switzerland) and in 2002 the Julius Baer Group in Geneva. Before Zopa Maurizio Pietro was CEO of Julius Baer Creval Private Banking Spa, a joint venture between the Julius Baer Group and Gruppo Credito Valtellinese.”

According to unverified sources the venture raised 2.8 million Euro funding from its shareholders. It is speculated that Zopa Italy will take higher fees (maybe 1 percent from lender and 1 percent from borrower) than Zopa in England. This seems possible since consumer banking costs in Italy are generally higher.