I miss my prospers.org buddies. It would have been much more pleasant to walk this walk with them. Anyways.
I've been talking to a few people in the P2P industry and that has led me to do a bit of research and things are interesting. I apologize if you can't discern a common thread in my blog posts today and if they don't all seem to make sense, but there is a story there somewhere.
Anyway, let's for a moment divert our attention to other P2P lending sites, and in this instance particularly to Boober, the Netherland's equivalent to Prosper. Firstly, it's interesting to note that both Zopa and Boober targeted Italy as a second country to expand to. Perhaps there's a story behind that? I mean, what are the odds with so many European countries and both P2P competitors deciding that Italy is ripe for P2P lending while Germany, France, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Croatia or perhaps Denmark isn't right?
Hmm..,
Anyway, I missed this and only found it today due to a some research. In August 2007, Boober was nearly shut down by the Dutch authorities. This article and this one are just a few of the many (I hope you can read Dutch! ;) )
Aparently, lenders at Boober got upset because higher than expected numbers of loans were defaulting (and this was in the very early days of Boober) and complained. They also banded together at Booberwatch. Interestingly enough, there is another organization, PIVN, that also seems to organize lenders across multiple P2P lending organizations.
Perhaps it is time for Prosper lenders or even lenders across all the US P2P organizations to come together?
Monday, March 31, 2008
We've been asleep at the wheel
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2 comments:
I almost joined Booberwatch under the impression it was something completely different and unrelated to P2P lending...
What would have shutting down the p2p site gained the lenders who were unhappy about the number of defaults?
Why are lenders who make bad loans angry at the site? Isn't this like people who lose money in stocks being angry at Nasdaq? Or Bear Sterns being angry at anybody but themselves?
While collection agencies vary in effectiveness, people default for real reasons that the P2P site can do very little about. Some people simply need to realize that if you casually lend with no regard to credit rating or other stats, they're going to lose money and the fact that this comes to a blow to
their ego, doesn't really matter
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