Loans & Credit Archives - Page 8 of 11

1995 Web Pioneer, Salem Five Launches Mobile Banking

By Jim Bruene Posted on May 8, 2007
Categories: Loans & Credit, Mobile Banking, Salem Five Savings Bank

Twelve years ago I spoke at the very first for-profit conference on online banking. It was held in San Francisco and put on by IQPC. One of the handful of bankers taking the stage was the marketing director from a small Massachusetts-based bank, Salem Five Savings Bank.

In 1995, Salem Five was one of the first 100 banks in the world to launch a website and continued to pioneer website functions during the last century, even launching a dedicated direct bank <directbanking.com> which has now been rolled back into the parent.

One early innovation was a mortgage lead generation tool consisting of an interactive $100-off closing costs coupon. It was still in use several years later when we named it an Online Banking Report Best of the Web winner in 1997 (see circa 1997 screenshot above, and the Online Banking Report article archived here).

It was "interactive" because in order to print it, the customer was required to first enter their name and phone number into the on-screen coupon. It was a great promotional idea, especially for 1995. And I still remember receiving a phone call the Saturday morning after I tested the coupon from the cheery Boston-based loan agent, wondering if I was moving to their area and interested in a mortgage. To this day, one of the best follow-ups I've experienced to an online lead.

Mobile Banking Launch
In April, Salem Five took another pioneering step, becoming one of the first community banks pushing mobile banking (here). However, its mShift-powered service is a WAP solution, not likely to be widely adopted in its current form. Last week another mShift client, Cardinal Bank, launched a similar mobile offering (here).

The bank is making sure its customers know about it with a page-dominating banner in heavy rotation on its homepage. Note: Salem Five uses both "wireless" and "mobile" to describe the service.

Salem Five homepage (8 May 2007)

Salem Five mobile banking landing page

For more information on mobile banking see our full report at our sister publication, Online Banking Report (here).

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Future Friday: Verity Credit Union’s Earth Day Tie-in

By Jim Bruene Posted on April 20, 2007
Categories: Advertising & Promotion, Green Marketing, Loans & Credit, Vancity CU, Verity CU

It's quite likely that energy consumption and environmental issues will grow in importance over the remainder of this decade and well into the next one. Financial institutions can play a positive role in promoting environmental causes both by their actions, such as Vancity's pledge to be carbon neutral by 2010, and by offering products that reduce paper consumption, such as eStatements and electronic payments (note 1).

Seattle's Verity Credit Union <veritycu.com> demonstrates another approach: offering an environmentally friendly premium for home equity applicants. The free compact fluorescent light bulbs are relatively low-cost but have a lasting value to the customer. Finally, the credit union wraps it all up neatly with a tie-in to the upcoming Earth Day (see homepage screenshot below and note 2).

Notes:

1. Because saving paper also saves the bank money, be just a bit careful that you don't come off as overly self-serving when promoting estatement options. Passing on some of the savings to the end-user and/or donating a portion of the savings to a good cause, could ease any criticism you might get.

2. The Earth Day promotion was one of five promotions offered in the main ad box, accessed via a Seattle IP address at 4 PM April 20, 2007.

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Kroger Stocks Aisle 1 with Mortgages, Puts Pet Insurance on a Hang-Tag by the Dog Food

By Jim Bruene Posted on April 4, 2007
Categories: Charter One, Credit/Debit Cards, Identity Theft, Loans & Credit, Royal Bank of Scotland

I never understood the fight against Wal-Mart's limited-purpose banking charter. I say let it "enjoy" all the benefits of being a bank: CRA statements, regulatory audits, compliance committees, and endless questions about trigger terms and the alphabet soup of regulations. Maybe a banking charter would have distracted it from going ahead and providing pretty much the same thing, but as a non-regulated retail partner instead of a bank.

Take Kroger for example. They are entering the financial services arena through their retail grocery stores with a menu of financial products outsourced from other companies (link here; also see note 1 and screenshot below).

According to a story Monday in the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader (here), the grocer began quietly rolling out the services to its 2400 stores in February. Most of the services are sourced through various Royal Bank of Scotland units.

Other than deposits, it's a full-service offering including:

Credit card issued by RBS National Bank (a unit of Royal Bank)
Mortgages through a joint venture with CCO Mortgage (a unit of Royal Bank)
Home equity loans through Charter Bank (a unit of Royal Bank)
Gift cards issued by Charter Bank
Pet insurance through PetFirst Healthcare
Identity theft services through Trilegiant's PrivacyGuard

Analysis
Kroger's product offering seems reasonable and no doubt will have good visibility in the company's stores. But few of these items are impulse buys and much of the success will hinge on whether the Royal Bank phone sales agents can close the deals. The item that has the best chance of earning its keep: pet insurance, a surprisingly popular search term (see Online Banking Report, #95) and one that can be cross-sold effectively with other pet items.

Will Kroger Personal Finance be be a success? With low fixed costs, it might turn a nice profit, but probably not nearly as much as the rent that bank clients pay for in-store branches (a core Wal-Mart strategy). But will it impact the industry? Highly unlikely.

I'm sure Wal-Mart will be following this rollout closely. If they find it's working at Kroger, you can bet they'll be doing the same thing within a few years, and probably at much lower prices. So, if you think you've dodged the Wal-Mart Bank bullet, think again.

Note:

1. The homepage of Kroger's personal finance site <krogerpersonalfinance.com>, is dominated by a pitch for its MasterCard rewards card. The only link so far to the broader offering is the "new products" link hidden on the right leading to the following page <krogerpersonalfinance.com/Max/KPFhome.htm>.

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First Peek: CommunityLend, Canada’s P2P Lending Startup

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 21, 2007
Categories: CommunityLend, Loans & Credit, P2P Lending, Prosper

Since publishing the first third-party research on so-called person-to-person, or social, lending, last year (link to report here), we've heard from entrepreneurs around the globe looking to replicate the model in their country. Most are still operating in stealth mode, but one has recently lifted the veil just a bit, with a placeholder website and email announcement list (see screenshot below). It's called CommunityLend, <communitylend.com> and it's targeting the Canadian market.

There's not much detail on CommunityLend site, but the startup already has 50+ Google links, many stemming from a brief mention in a March 9 Finextra article (here). The Founder and President is Michel Garrity, previously VP Marketing & Sales at ePost. Others on the team, at least in advisory roles, are ex-Bank of Montreal exec and BankWatch blogger Colin Henderson and John Philip Green (profile here), currently Director of Engineering at Affinity Labs and Co-Founder of of Savvica and Rapleaf. Development efforts are spearheaded by a Toronto-based Ruby on Rails shop, Unspace.

It looks like an innovative group and it will be interesting to see how they approach the social lending market. We'll keep you posted as the company moves towards its fall 2007 launch goal.

Contact: info@communitylend.com

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Social Lending Pioneer Zopa Celebrates Second Birthday

By Jim Bruene Posted on March 7, 2007
Categories: Bank 2.0, Loans & Credit, Prosper, Zopa

The nascent market of online social or person-to-person (P2P) lending turned two as its pioneer, UK-based Zopa, celebrated its second birthday today. In addition to slapping a this enormous "2" button on its homepage (see screenshot below), the company marked the occasion with an open house at its headquarters, an online lunch-time webcast, and an online giveaway of ten iPod shuffles (see the text of the email message sent to Zopa lenders and borrowers here).

The Latest Numbers out of Zopa

According to Easier Finance (thanks to PaymentsNews for the link):

Zopa has 135,000 members
Zopa lenders have received on average 6.75% before-tax annual return after fees and defaults
Zopa borrowers have obtained loans at rates as low as 4.2% APR
The current default rate is only 20 basis points, 0.2%

Zopa continues to create a considerable buzz in the UK. The company's homepage links to 42 articles from a diverse range of publications, most recently The Sunday Times and The Daily Mirror. And my favorite, an awesome piece from the UK's public-service Channel 4, that is unlike anything I've ever seen on U.S. news (click the play button below).

The YouTube replay of the 4-minute feature was posted to Zopa's blog March 1 along with TV clips from CNBC and Fresno, CA news. The Channel 4 piece covers the topic of "social lending" in general and primarily covers Zopa, but near the end, another UK alternative lender is interviewed, Fair Finance <fairfinance.co.uk> is interviewed. We'll look at Fair Finance in a separate post.

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Prosper Raises Prices, Adds Features on First Anniversary

By Jim Bruene Posted on February 12, 2007
Categories: Loans & Credit, Prosper

At its first annual user meeting, which kicked off today in San Francisco, Prosper unveiled a number of changes to its person-to-person lending exchange. The most interesting is that the site is no longer taking loan listings from all comers. They have eliminated the New Credit (NC) category and now require a minimum FICO score of 520 to participate (see email announcement below).

Neither change will affect loan-origination volume in a measurable way, since few of those loans were funded by investors. However, it does eliminate one of the feel-good aspects of the site, the ability for anyone to use it to start, or re-start, their credit history.

Price increase
But Prosper is first and foremost a for-profit business, so the policy change is not surprising. In the same vein, the company announced a price increase for riskier credits, doubling the loan-origination fee to 2% on high-risk (E & HR) loans, and doubling the annual servicing fee to 1% of the outstanding balance on on all but A and AA loans. Late payment fees also tripled from $5 to $15 each month. Finally, Group Leader rewards have increased up to four-fold, which will have the effect of raising rates for many borrowers.

Lender enhancements
Prosper also added several enhancements to assist lenders in evaluation loans, including:

100% identity-theft protection providing full refunds for fraudulent loan applications
ROI estimator, a tool that uses historical Prosper data to project return on investment
Public borrower Q&A: Like eBay, lenders can now ask borrowers specific questions, and the borrower can opt to answer the question with a public response to be displayed within the loan listing
Additional credit report data: Six new fields are now available to lenders, making 12 credit bureau-sourced data points for each loan listing (see screenshot below). This is a huge change from a year ago, when only the letter grade was available to make lending decisions (Prosper's full explanation of credit data available is here).

Borrower enhancements
Although attracting lenders is the key to the company's survival, Prosper added a new feature to help borrowers make their loan listing more believable, member endorsements. Now, any Prosper member, including the Group Leader, can add an endorsement or testimonial to a loan listing (see Group Leader endorsement below; the full loan listing is reprinted in the Notes section).

Borrowers can also show a list of "Prosper friends" to further enhance their credibility. The friends' network shows in the upper-right info box (see inset).

Notes:

For a more detailed look at Prosper and person-to-person lending, refer to Online Banking Report #127.
Previous NetBanker coverage is here.
Full loan listing shows endorsement (at right, click to enlarge).
Feb. 12 email announces the changes (see Lender section above, click on image to enlarge).

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More Supply than Demand at Zopa

By Jim Bruene Posted on December 15, 2006
Categories: Loans & Credit, Prosper, Zopa

In a blog post today, person-to-person lender Zopa told its U.K. lenders that, due to a seasonal "lack of creditworthy borrowers," it would take a bit longer to lend out their money this month. However, the company predicted a seasonal upturn in January as more good borrowers looked for funds. The company reminded lenders that they still earn 4.25% on idle funds held by Zopa.

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Vehicle Auctions Hit the Homepage at Houston Federal Credit Union (HFCU)

By Jim Bruene Posted on December 6, 2006
Categories: Lead Generation, Loans & Credit, Website Usability & Design

Many financial institutions sell or auction repossessed vehicles to the public. However, not many use this by-product of installment lending as a prospecting tool on their homepage.

We came across this novel approach at Houston Federal Credit Union <houstonfcu.org> while putting together a presentation titled "Extreme Website Makeovers" for an upcoming American Bankers Associate conference. The first place we looked for inspiration was the client list of Trabian, a talented new website designer concentrating on the credit union market (grab a feed to their outstanding blog, OpenSourceCU here).

Trabian's client, HFCU, includes a link to its vehicle auctions on the right-side of its homepage (see screenshot below). Clicking on the box takes users to the main auction page where any registered user may bid on the vehicle (in this case, just a single motorcycle was up for auction).

Analysis
Everyone loves a good deal, and unlike retailers who can drop a loss-leader on their homepage to generate excitement, financial institutions have far fewer options. Vehicle auctions provide an interesting way to encourage members to check back periodically to see if they could get a smoking hot deal on a used sedan, truck, or bass boat.

It's also a good prospecting tool. Nonmembers are allowed to register on the site and bid. This provides the credit union an immediate opportunity to make a sales pitch such as the "Wish your auto loan was at HFCU instead?" in the center of the page.

The email address supplied by the bidder also enables the CU to market to the nonmember in future emails. Finally, anyone who buys the auctioned vehicle is a great candidate for an HFCU loan, which are positioned in the upper-right of the auction page (see screenshot below).

Making it even better
We love the idea, and it works well even in its relatively simple form. It would be even better with a few additions:

It would drive even more traffic with an email and RSS feed option for receiving information on new auction items and for monitoring bids.
The credit union would generate more interest by including a variety of vehicles (even if they bought a few at auction to seed the site). Today's sole entry was a 2005 Suzuki motorcycle with a buy-it-now price of $6300.
The auction format and tools are relatively crude by today's standards. For example, it wasn't obvious who the other bidders were, how long it had been up for auction, or what the next bid needed to be. There are numerous auction services that could provide a more eBay-like experience.
It would be helpful to integrate the auction more closely with the loan center so users could easily calculate monthly payments, insurance costs, etc.

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Zopa to Offer Lender Guarantees

By Jim Bruene Posted on November 23, 2006
Categories: Loans & Credit, Prosper, Zopa

In a blog post today, person-to-person lending pioneer Zopa announced several usability improvements in its upcoming release, a new My Zopa screen and Quick Lend area.

But what caught our eye was Zopa's upcoming option to guarantee the return of principal for its lenders. There's no free lunch, of course, so an insurance premium must be paid when lenders choose this option. Even though that will cause returns to fall to a more "normal" rate, it could be a psychological boost that brings in more funds. At minimum, it will generate press coverage.

The new guarantee is still awaiting U.K. regulatory approval. We'll look at it in more detail when it becomes available.

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Online Lending Still an Afterthought

By Jim Bruene Posted on November 16, 2006
Categories: BAI, BAI Retail Delivery, Loans & Credit

BAI's Retail Delivery Conference continues to offer an excellent array of speakers on almost every delivery topic, from the "branch experience" to "optimizing multi-channel delivery." But one area that's barely covered is loan originations.

Only one session, out of 36 total, dealt with lending issues this year. And it was a last-minute replacement, not even in the program guide, substituting for NetBank and UPS's Banking on Brown, scrubbed after the announcement last week that the effort was being shuttered (see our coverage here).

Cornerstone Advisor's Steve Williams presented Consumer Lending: It's Not Just a Transaction Anymore. Although lightly attended, due to its placement at the closing moments of the show, he discussed a number of great ideas for improving loan originations, both online and in other channels. We'll look at some of them in more detail in coming weeks.

The presentation is available via email from swilliams@crnrstone.com.

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Prosper Books its 4,000th Loan

By Jim Bruene Posted on October 31, 2006
Categories: Loans & Credit, Prosper

Nine-month old Prosper announced its results to date (press release here):

$20 million in loans originated
4,000 loans booked ($5,000 average)
100,000 registered users

It's a good start for the person-to-person lender, running about 25% to 30% ahead of our projections made when the company launched (see Online Banking Report #127).

However, they are a long way away from profitability, booking just $200,000 in loan fees during the first nine months, plus less than $50,000 in servicing fees and some pocket change in late fees, which are shared with lenders.

The company may need to consider hosting advertisements to prop up the bottom line. With high CPMs in the loan and personal finance market, Prosper could potentially make more on advertising than it does on the loan originations.

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Prosper Launches Group Ratings, Schedules User Meeting

By Jim Bruene Posted on October 23, 2006
Categories: Conference Calendar, Loans & Credit, Prosper, Zopa

Person-to-person lender, Prosper, announced its first annual user meeting next February in San Francisco. Registration is a refundable $25 and includes an all-day session with dinner on Monday, Feb. 12, and a half-day on Tuesday, Feb. 13.

The agenda has not been published. Online signup is here.

The October newsletter (see End Notes for screenshot) also announced the arrival of the group ratings, an important milestone for the nine-month-old service. Group ratings promise to help lenders locate borrowers with better-than-expected likelihood of repayment. If it works, Prosper could become a major force in consumer lending. If it doesn't, the company will have to find another way to beat the loan default odds.

For more information:

For prior coverage of Prosper and its U.K. rival Zopa, look here.
For detailed analysis of the market, see Online Banking Report #127 published in March

End Notes (click on the link below to see Prosper's Oct. newsletters)

Banner advertising at About.com's banking blog <bank.about.com>

Landing page for direct navigation to <bankofamerica.com/nofeemortgage>

Landing page from bank's Google ad on "bank of america mortgage no fee"

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