Zopa: peer-to-peer lending

[phantom power]

Peer-to-peer lending is a smarter, fairer and more human way of doing money. It's like borrowing and lending with your friends and family - except there are thousands of people you can lend and borrow with.

Both lenders and borrowers get better rates, because peer-to-peer lending is more efficient than the traditional banking model. Banks have massive overheads, with thousands of employees to pay and hundreds of branches to maintain. So they have to take large margins on the money that passes through them.

There's no smoke and mirrors here. Banks use your money to make even more money for themselves. They lend some of it out, gamble some of it on the price of tin or the Yen depreciating, and invest the rest in any other money-making schemes they can think of.

Whereas at Zopa, people who have spare money lend it directly to people who want to borrow. There are no banks in the middle, no huge overheads and no unethical investments.

http://uk.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[CanonRay]

2. Anybody here done this?

I'm very interested.

[CanonRay]

3. Unfortunately it is for UK residents only

lucky them. The banks here won't let this start.

[Warpy]

4. Kiva started that way

and soon had to go with microlending banks around the world. It's still peer to peer, though, people funding loans that have already been disbursed so the microbank can lend it out again. Kiva still does lend directly in some cases, though.