Prosper and Lending Club are the two biggest US p2p lending institutions.
You can read what Mr. Cheap wrote about Prosper here and here.
A note to fellow Canucks..Prosper is only available to US residents.
You can check out this post on Lazy Man and Money for more Prosper thoughts as well as an opposing point of view on Free Money Finance.
Financial Blogger had a few words to say about it as well as raising the question “Where is Prosper.ca?”.
Canadian Capitalist isn’t that impressed. He also links to a few other review posts.
And finally Brip Blap who writes for the official Prosper blog wrote an interesting post on why he wants to be the bank.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the link. BTW, anybody know when CommunityLend is launching? It’s been more than 6 months since they said they are launching soon.
Thanks for asking. We will be launching early 2008. We recently re-launched our public site with updated information. It took longer than we had hoped to get to this stage, but we are pleased with the substantive progress that we have now made, around funding, management team, and a superlative Board of Directors.
Colin
Yeah, sorry that Prosper is so unfriendly to the North-of-the-Border-ites. I imagine that it will be a while before it opens up to the north, but it is an interesting concept and I’m sure a Canadian equivalent is bound to spring up soon, be it CommunityLend or something else.
It’s a great idea for diversifying, although I certainly wouldn’t make it 25% of my portfolio or anything like that. I do like writing for them because I LOVE the idea of people-to-people lending, but past that I love the idea of direct investing – cutting out the brokers and middlemen everywhere. Prosper brutally eliminated corporate banks without changing the underlying transaction, and that is a great, great idea. If you want to lend money, and someone wants to borrow, why involve a bank? (Sorry to echo my own post…)
BB – thanks for the comment.
I don’t have any personal interest in it but you’re right – as a diversifier it could be useful.
I’m not sure about cutting out the middleman – seems like Prosper is the middleman and they spend a lot of money on marketing.
Mike