Entries Tagged 'Zopa' ↓
June 17th, 2008 — Zopa, security
(This security leak was plugged in under 24 hours from reporting… Luke from Zopa confirmed fix in comments at the end of the post. This note was added after the security leak was fixed.)
I was randomly checking my stats on Zopa and noticed that a person with whom I am familiar had chosen to help my Zopa loan… Thank you!!!
There is a feature on Zopa that allows you to send a thank you note via the website… So, I decided to do just that and I sent the note…
Moments later I received an email on which I was cc’ed… Now I have this person’s email address. Seems like a security leak to me.
It is not like I couldn’t have gotten in touch with this person in another manner… But if the person was a total unknown Zopa just sent me their email address…
I am open about my email address, but I know some people (my wife for example) would be quite upset at her email address being given out…
I informed my contacts at Zopa and they insured me that this security breach would be addressed right away with utmost priority.
If you are interested in a ZOPA CD consider helping out my loan… I promise I wont send you a thank you note to obtain your email…
Click picture for a larger image….
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May 15th, 2008 — Kiva, Lending Club, Zopa
Zopa took the Webby in Financial Services (Mint was People’s Choice). On Zopa you can buy a CD and help reduce my loan without giving up any of your entitled interest (current rate 3.75%): Start Here When Buying Your CD
Lending Club took the Webby in Banking / Bill Paying (Mint was People’s Choice). Lending Club is currently in a quiet period and is not currently accepting new commitments from lenders or allowing new members to register as lenders.
Kiva took the People’s Choice for Charitable Organizations NonProfit. Kiva is a very worthwhile charity, but you don’t make any interest.
Here is the website to see all the nominees and winners: 12th Annual Webby Awards Nominees
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April 30th, 2008 — Zopa
For the regular reads this may be a bit of a rehash (Fed Cuts Rate 75 Basis Points — I bought a Zopa US CD at 5.1%), but the fed cut rates again today… If you have been considering buying a CD now is the time a Zopa is the place. They are currently offering a 3.75% APY.
Buy buying your CD with this link you will be helping to reduce the interest rate of my Zopa loan. Zopa took best in show honors at finovate based on a presentation where the CEO Doug Dolton had everyone thinking it was possible to get a negative interest rate loan. I am not disputing that it is possible, in fact I hope it happens to me.
To that end, here is my standing offer… If you are a blogger/website owner/operator and buy a Zopa CD that helps my loan I will give you a permanent link in this post. If you help my loan by $1/month or more I will give a link in this post and my blogroll. (Huge discount against my ratecard.)
So how about it? Get a a great rate on a CD, help a blogger with his loan, and get a link(s) in return.
Regardless, more on Zopa at finovate tomorrow.
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April 22nd, 2008 — Lending Club, Loanio, Prosper.com, Zopa
Another late loan and another withdrawal. Eagerly awaiting the end of the “quiet period.” I think competition is good for the market and at the exact moment it feels like Prosper is the loan dog (pun intended) in the p2p lending market… Zopa provides a CD and Lending Club doesn’t have lenders. Will loanio launch at finovate startup? Are there others in stealth mode waiting to launch… Now seems like the time…
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January 30th, 2008 — Zopa
A few days ago I wrote about the Zopa CD being the best national cd rate at 5.1% after the federal reserve cut the fed funds rate by 75 basis points. RateLadder locked in the 5.1% rate with a 1 year $500 CD.
Alas if you did not take advantage of the 5.1% CD it is no longer available. Zopa has reduced the rate to 4.5%. It is a NCUA insured CD, which means it is guaranteed. At 4.5% it is not nearly as exciting and interesting as 5.1%. The top yielding 1 year CD in the nation is at 4.71%.
Wall street is expecting another rate cut and when/if it occurs Zopa might yet again look attractive. If history is our guide, you need to be ready if you want to lock in a great rate.
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January 24th, 2008 — Zopa
Two days I purchased a Zopa CD right after the Federal Reserve cut the fed funds rate 75 basis points. I half expected Zopa to renege on the 5.1% that I signed up under, especially since Bank Rate not shows that a 5.1% 1 year CD is now the top yielding 1 year CD in the nation by almost 20 basis points as of this morning.
What was the process?
After signing up two days ago I waited. Late yesterday I got an email…
Subject: ZOPA | Your CD’s Ready - Action Required
Hi RateLadder,
Your Zopa CD application is almost complete.
You just need to log in to your account and formally agree to the final terms of your CD:
<link to click on>
Kind regards,
The Zopa Team
www.zopa.com
=====================================================
Questions?
Log on to your secure Zopa email account here:
<link to click on>
-or-
Give us a call at 1-888-TRY-ZOPA (1-888-879-9672) (weekdays, 8am - 6pm PT). We’d love to chat.
To ensure your privacy, reply to this email via the instructions above.
I immediately assumed they were going to reduce the rate. THEY DID NOT…. They honored the 5.1% and they are still showing 5.1% on their website… If you are looking for a 1 year CD there is no better place to get that CD at the moment. Zopa has a higher yield by 20 basis points than any other national CD!
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January 22nd, 2008 — Zopa
I have been stalling. I have said I would try all the P2P lending platforms available to me and up until reading the esteemed bamalucky (I bought a Zopa CD today) I hadn’t pulled the trigger on my Zopa investment. While I suspect our reasons for wanting a Zopa CD are different. Bama’s reasoning behind today being the day to buy your CD makes perfect sense — the Federal Reserve cut the rate 75 basis points. With a 75 basis point cut to the fed funds rate, the 5.1% offered by Zopa US is looking attractive. Inspired by bama, I made my purchase.
Now that I have tried it I can say it was easy enough to sign up and complete the transaction… I selected Provident Credit Union as my credit union, filled in my information, and I was done.
I am still not sure why a CD is p2p lending, but apparently I did help someone in San Mateo County California. (You are required to choose at least 1 person to “help”.) However, since it is FDIC insured I can say with certainty my $500 will be worth $525.50 in 1 year (Zopa CD has a 1 year term).
I can say this with confidence, if they lower the rate I will not accept the CD (see the picture above, but “Your CD may take up to 24 hours to create”).
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January 21st, 2008 — Zopa
The following is a guest post from plonkee money. She writes about personal finance from a British point of view.
The biggest peer to peer lending site in the UK is Zopa. In fact, I think it might be the only one. Here’s how it works for Limeys.
Paying Money In
You can pay money in via bank transfer or paypal - you can also add money by phoning up with your debit card, and by setting up a regular standing order. Money in your holding account earns interest at 0.75% below the Bank of England base rate, the very best savings accounts are currently running at around 0.3% to 0.4% above the base rate. You can easily lend any amount between £10 and £25,000 in total. I you want to lend more than £25,000 you need a licence from the Office of Fair Trading (Zopa can help you arrange this).
Fees
Zopa charge 0.5% to borrowers on the money that they have borrowed, and 0.5% to lenders on the money that they have lent out. The lenders fee is collected monthly in arrears and is not charged on any defaulted payments, or if the loan has been paid back early.
Lending Money Out - Quick Lend
As the name suggests, this is the quick and dirty method of getting your money lent out. You can set a term of between 1 and 5 years (in whole years) and then set the rate of return that you would like (after fees and expected bad debt).
For each term length there is a Zone Of Possible Agreement (hence the name of the company ZOPA) for the interest rates. A nifty little venn diagram shows you how your proposed agreement fits in, whether it is above, below or at the zone of possible agreement. Zopa point out that if you set it your interest rate too high you risk your money being lent out very slowly. If you set it too low you will get the money lent out pretty quickly (but you lose out on the return).
Custom Lend
You can fine tune your offer in all the markets, which are split by length of loan (in whole years from 1 to 5) and credit rating (ranging from A* to C). It shows you the following for each market
- expected rate of return
- lowest and highest offers for the last 5 matched loans
- the percentage that are offering lower than you are proposing
- how quickly you are likely to lend money out
- whether you are in the zone of possible agreement
You can also fine tune your diversification, by altering the maximum amount of money you are willing to lend to any one person. As offers are combined before being lent out, it’s possible that two investors could be lending to the same individual and getting different returns.
Estimated bad debt varies from category to category, from 0.5% to 3.1%. I haven’t seen any information on actual hard figures for defaulting.
Listings
A new way of lending money that has just been started is via listings. It’s still in beta testing at the moment, but essentially you get to pick which individuals you would like to fund from the brief blurb that they’ve written and their credit score. You then pick an amount and interest rate that you are prepared to offer, and then after 12 days, offers are combined that will give the lowest possible rate for that borrower.
After Lending
Once you’ve offered the money out, it goes into processing whilst the borrower is checked out by underwrites. Once it’s been lent you can monitor it’s performance online. You get some details about the people that you’ve lent to - their age, their general location, and the reason that they wanted to borrow the money (mine are all consolidating debt) - and a brief profile that they’ve written. You can also check up on defaults or autolend more money on the same offer.
Commentary
Zopa is very easy to use - I especially like the graphical representations - and they really go out of their way to make the whole thing clear.
Thinking in particular about lending money, I actually prefer being one step removed from the borrowers. It makes it more of a business transaction, and I feel less judgemental if I don’t know too many details in advance. I’m also not tempted to bid on loans that aren’t going to be profitable
At the moment I’ve only got a very tiny portfolio of loans (lent out at 7+%), but that’s mostly because I’m trying to keep my finances on auto-pilot, and I think that you do better if you are a little more active, as the market for loans changes. If I have a sum of money that I don’t know what to do with, I’ll probably stick some in Zopa. I don’t think I would bother if they didn’t pay money on the holding account. The payments I’m receiving are too low to be lent out, so that money would be earning nothing without the interest.
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January 16th, 2008 — Lending Club, News, Prosper.com, Zopa
The P2P lending buzz is everywhere…
Today it is in the Miami Herald: Anyone can be a banker with peer-to-peer lending
When Walter Kond needed $25,000 to buy a shipment of home-theater seats for his Hialeah company to resell, he didn’t go to the bank. He went online. Kond posted a loan request on Prosper.com and a few days later, more than 300 absolute strangers had pooled together the cash for a three-year loan at 13 percent interest.
Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer lending — where anyone with Web access can be a banker and small business owners like Kond are finding a new way to raise cash.
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January 15th, 2008 — Kiva, Lending Club, Loanio, MicroPlace, News, Prosper.com, Zopa
A couple of peer-to-peer (p2p) lending articles came out in major publications over the weekend… Enjoy…
The ChicagoTribue: Peer-to-peer lending helpful, but know rules
Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.
At least that’s the mind-set of individuals who lend and borrow money from each other online, known as peer-to-peer lending. In this virtual community you may stand a better chance of obtaining a loan for your start-up business or earning an attractive return.
But though based on self-rule, peer-to-peer lending is not without its conditions. Consider the following before you forgo the bank entirely. [...]
The Washington Post: You Can Lend P2P, but Can You Collect?
In the wake of the subprime mortgage meltdown, traditional financial institutions have tightened up on who gets to borrow money. But some people are still finding ways to borrow what they need, thanks to another area of lending that is booming.
Person-to-person lending, or “social” lending, is growing at a phenomenal pace on the Internet as consumers look for an alternate way to pay off debt, according to new research by Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin predicts that the demand for person-to-person lending services, or P2P, to pay off credit card debt may grow from $38 billion to $159 billion over the next five years. [...]
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