Comments on: Lending Club And Prosper – Peer To Peer Lending

By: Four Pillars

Four Pillars — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:24:59 +0000

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

By: Brip Blap

Brip Blap — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:48:34 +0000

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…)

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:06:52 +0000

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

By: Canadian Capitalist

Canadian Capitalist — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:57:49 +0000

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.