German p2p lending service Smava has sent its lenders an email asking them to produce short videos telling their personal experiences using Smava. Smava offers 50 Euro (approx. 75 US$) for each user generated video that is sent to Smava and published.
Three (older) videos by Smava lenders can be viewed here.
Zopa UK has raised fees for new lenders to 1% (annual of capital outstanding). Old lenders continue to be served at the 0.5% fee.
MyC4.com will start to offer loans in Rwanda next week. This is the fourth country MyC4 is lending at, after Uganda, Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire. Mads Kjaer, CEO of MyC4, is quoted that Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal and South Africa will follow. In 2009 he aims to serve borrowers in 20 countries in Africa. (Source)
In a danish television video (15 min, danish language), which was broadcastes yesterday, MyC4 is presented as a good alternative for investing and gains a recommendation of MyBanker.dk, a website comparing banks.
Maneo.jp aims to be the first active p2p lending service in Japan. Their mission statement (from a press release):
maneo Inc. plans to offer a user friendly and highly secure online community for people to borrow and lend money through an online auction system. maneo is about helping people lend and borrow money with each other, sidestepping the expense and inconvenience of traditional banks and consumer finance companies. People who want to borrow money register with maneo and create loan listings. Potential lenders register with maneo and bid on the loan listings they are interested in. maneo aggregates the bids with the lowest rates to fund the relevent loans and handles all of the administrative matters relating to the loans
Maneo received venture capital from J-Seed Ventures Inc. and Yasuda Enterprise Development Co., Ltd. The last funding round was in April 2008 for 80 million Yen (approx. 0.75 million US$). The first funding round was in April 2007.
The company website currently says “Coming in Summer 2008”. Zopa and Prosper also have announced plans for Japan, but no launch date has been set so far.
(Sources/further reading: 1, 2, 3 – all in japanese)
Following through on the announcement (read: Zopa UK plans Young Market to target young borrower) Zopa has launched this market segment. Zopa says, it will help young adults, aged 20 to 25 obtain a loan, which otherwise would have difficulties – not because they have a bad credit history but because they have little or no credit history.
Zopa lenders can choose to make offers to these young applicants, with the added attraction of being able to charge a higher rate of interest because of the higher risk that these as yet unproven younger borrowers represent. So whereas the safest borrowers coming to Zopa can typically get a 5000 GBP loan over 3 years at around 8.5%, Young Market borrowers will be able to get the same loan at around 12.5%.
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)