Zopa <zopa.com> continues to work towards a 2006 launch of the U.S. version of its person-to-person lending exchange. The company is trying to spur a bit of word-of-mouth in advance of its launch by buying a case of beer for anyone sponsoring a Zopa barbecue this summer.

The company website also contains a newsletter-like posting <www.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/ promo/newsletter/ us/issue1/> with info on the U.S. division (click on inset for closeup).

Beside promoting the free beer offer, the newsletter profiles Bruce Brenkus, VP Credit and Risk at Zopa U.S., an excellent choice of subject matter since credit management is the biggest concern for prospective Zopa lenders.

A few weeks ago we published our first report on so-called person-to-person lending (see OBR #127). Two companies have created P2P lending exchanges, Prosper in the U.S. and Zopa in the U.K. (see NetBanker Feb. 25). While we like the concept, these exchanges have a number of hurdles to overcome. One of the challenging issues is how to convince individuals to loan money to strangers.

Most P2P lending is between family and friends. And that won't change no matter how big the loan marketplaces becomes. Government reports peg the interpersonal loan market at $80 to $90 billion.

One of the stickiest issues in friends-and-family lending is keeping the borrower current on their agreed-upon repayment schedule. It's easy for kids to "forget" that loan payment to mom and dad; likewise, parents don't want to put a damper on Sunday dinner with a discussion of junior's financial situation.

Financial institutions could play a role in automating personal loan repayments, by putting the repayment transactions on autopilot. It can already be done through bill payment systems that support automated recurring payments. But users still need to do their own research to come up with the correct amortization schedule.

How it would work
With a little programming, a bank could develop a module that allows lenders to set up a repayment plan by entering the loan details (amount, interest rate including zero, and term) and borrower info (name, email address). An email would go to the borrower asking them to agree to the terms, authorize the deduction from their bank account, and provide bank account details. The borrower would also be required to authenticate their access to the account through username/password or by correctly identifying small deposits made to their account.

The lender or borrower (if authorized) should be able to log in at any time and suspend or alter the automatic deductions.

The business case
Borrowers and/or lenders could be charged a set-up fee for each loan, plus small transaction fees each month. For example, a $75 set-up fee plus $3 per payment. Pricing could be tiered by loan size.

If 2% of your online banking base eventually used the service, it could generate $1,000 to $1,200 in annual revenues per 1,000 online banking users (assuming average loan term of three years). For Bank of America, that's $15 to $20 million per year. But for a community bank or mid-size credit union, it might generate only a few thousand dollars annually.

Unless you are large, that's not enough to justify programming it yourself; however, if a software company made it available for a reasonable fee, it might make a good new feature for online banking. As the industry matures, banks will need to add value to their services to attract more users. Also, the long-term nature of loan repayments, especially with family lending, could help tie both the lender and borrow to your bank for years.

Service providers
There is already one company that's been facilitating person-to-person loans for more than four years: CircleLending.com, a company we first learned about in a favorable Wall Street Journal article published in 2002. The company has taken the concept to a high level, facilitating not just personal unsecured loans, but also owner-financed real estate, commercial loans, and other complex secured funding (click on screenshot right for details). It charges $199 plus $9 per payment for simple loans, up to $1000 or more for mortgages.

Another newcomer, PalTrust, is an apparently small startup that has a two-page website, <paltrust.com> with a mockup of its personal lending application. The patent-pending process looks much like PayPal (click on screenshot for a closeup).

—JB

Chris Larsen, who helped invent financial e-commerce by creating E-Loan <eloan.com> in 1997, is back on the scene mere months after selling the company to Popular Inc. last summer for $300 million. His new company, Prosper.com, first discussed here on Feb. 6, is built around the idea of creating communities of people who lend to and borrow from each other. The idea, he says, isn’t too far away from Jimmy Stewart’s savings and loan in Frank Capra’s film, It’s a Wonderful Life, where ordinary people lent to each other and made them all more prosperous.

The business premise is comparable to the model of Zopa, the UK-based, person-to-person lending site that opened last summer (see NB Nov. 22) with funding from Benchmark's European unit. But while Larsen concedes the similarity, he says he had the idea first. “This is something Bob [Kagle] and I talked about long before the Zopa guys had come to Benchmark [Europe] —since 2003, in fact,” he says.

Robert Kagle is a Benchmark Capital partner who provided much of the original financing for E-Loan, and who served as an E-Loan director. The Prosper idea attracted them, adds Larsen, because while the E-Loan idea worked relatively well—it originated and sold $26.7 billion in mortgages between 1997 and June 2005—it wasn’t really what they’d wanted to do, which was more along the lines of Prosper.

Larsen says, “[At E-loan] we were beholden to the capital markets, rather than being able to create a whole new marketplace that’s supported just by people. This is more of a pure model, an opportunity to start from a clean sheet of paper and design something from the ground up.” Plus, he adds, the public that could support a Prosper didn’t exist in 1997. “You couldn’t do [Prosper] back then. PayPal very much blazed a trail, and you really couldn’t do this until they had come along.”

The company
Prosper is funded by venture capital funds that include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Ventures, and the Omidyar Network. Prosper opened with something of a bang the week of Feb. 6, getting plenty of high-profile press in the mainstream media, and, according to Larsen, attracting more than $750,000 to its loan pools in the first week of business. And the first week’s business seems promising: As of Feb. 24, 301 loans were up for auction, up from 168 a week earlier. Loan sizes range from $1,000 to $25,000.

How it works
Prospective borrowers are first given a credit rating by Prosper after being vetted by credit score, a fraud check, and income. The borrower then lists the reason for their loan, uploads pictures if desired, and selects a starting interest rate, essentially the highest rate they would accept.

Individual lenders, who go through their own authentication process before being allowed to participate, can bid for as little as $50 of any particular loan, specifying the minimum rate they will accept. Prosper charges the borrower a 1 percent loan-origination fee and levies a 0.50 percent annual servicing fee to the lender on the outstanding balance.

Analysis
One of the problems faced by the venture is adverse selection, the tendency for loan applications to be dominated by those most in need of credit and least likely to repay. If poor credit risks overrun the venture, higher quality applicants, and the investors looking for them, will desert both Prosper and Zopa.

Another question is whether lenders will feel adequately compensated for their risks. Larsen says he wants his lenders to “capture the 10 percent spreads between short-term money and credit card deposits,” and compares the expected returns at Prosper to the AA corporate credit market, which currently gives investors a 7 percent return, or 6.5 percent after defaults. Zopa says it has provided lenders a 7 percent average return with no defaults in the seven months it’s been open for business, but this is not a period statistically significant enough to predict future performance.

On the other hand, much of business is betting on horses, and on jockeys, and Larsen has proven himself adept at both picking horses and riding them. It may be that the time is right for a business built more along the lines of Jimmy Stewart’s small town savings and loan, and less along the lines of a modern bank's unyielding underwriting algorithms. (Contact: Prosper.com, Chris Larsen, 415-362-7272)

—AR

Previous articles:
— Prosper Feb. 6
— Zopa Nov. 22