My colleague Josh has posted on the emergence of peer-to-peer lenders before, but it bears repeating:
These tools are not going away. In fact, quite the opposite.
In his his original post, Josh pondered, “How successful Lending Club will be…remains to be seen.” Well, in a post today, TechCrunch notes “Lending Club, the Facebook exclusive person-to-person lending service has passed the $1 million mark in loans to Facebook users.”
That’s not all, to me the big story is the timeframe – “The milestone comes just short of 3 months since the the site hit the $100,000 mark, and 3 1/2 months since going live as an original Facebook Platform partner.” It took less than four months to hit $1 million in loans. The average loans is about $4,700 to $5,250. How many credit unions can say that?
Lending Club will also announce today that they will expand to thousands of alumni associations and professional organizations.
For more information:
Filene recently released a report on peer-to-peer lending here. My favorite nugget from the report is where author George Hofheimer notes, “I had presented the P2P lending model to him [a CU lifer] and a group of credit union executives. What struck this experienced CEO was the similarity between credit unions in the 1950s and P2P lenders today.”
That’s right folks – History is repeating itself. Credit unions need to get back to their roots.
Other peer-to-peer sites of note:
- > Prosper
- > Zopa
- > Kiva
- > CircleLending
Related articles:
- > Peer-To-Peer Lending: A Prototype For The Future Of Mortgage Lending
- > Wikipedia entry on P2P Lending
- > The virtual moneylender
- > Peer-to-peer lending sites a growing presence on the Web
Finally, a shameless (but related) plug – The CUNA Councils just released a great white paper entitled, Member and Staff Retention in a Gen Y World. More info is here.
