Idea #1: Social lending (p2p) New Zealand

I’ve been very interested in this phenonemon for a few months now… I thought it would be a great idea to implement something for New Zealand and Australia back in May… by July I discovered that there were other competitors interested in New Zealand. And to be honest, I’m still not convinced it is a bad idea to get involved! But for now I will wait and see, these seervices should be available in New Zealand before anyone else gets something together…

Peer Mint are interested in bringing a service incorporating Australia, Canada and New Zealand. This is the better looking of the ideas I am familiar with for our region, I just don’t think there is a strong customer base in NZ alone. But uniting 3 regions, should relieve some demand for lenders. They will obviously have to deal with foreign currency exchange, but this can add to investor returns and also make lending more attractive!

Globe Funder would satisfy the risks I mentioned above, but I don’t think they have the right idea in their model. They seem to be looking for solid investors? And are possibly only going live in the USA… they just missed their October go-live date. So may be running into issues with their model?

Nexx.co.nz is a pure NZ offering, winner of the Spark 40K challenge and all current students at Auckland University. Their model is very similar to the Prosper model of lending - where bidders elect how much they will contribute towards the loan and at what rate. The bidders with the lowest offered interest rate win, on Prosper, the winning bids are hidden and the interest charged to the borrower is the lowest loosing bid less .5%. Prosper.com has a very nice interface for this, but they only offer services in the USA. It looks like Nexx will go live some time in January or February.

You can keep up to date on the current social lending and p2p lending news from around the world on P2p-Banking and Social lending watch. Nexx does have their own blog, but I haven’t seen anything new there since they changed from DoshMob. So you’d be best to follow the social lending blogs!

Last 5 posts by James Little