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Need Money?
October 4th, 2007
Armin Noack
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Do you need money but don’t want to pay high rates? Just click on the “social lending site” Zopa.com. It’s the place “where people meet to lend and borrow money”. Zopa is as simple as useful. Lenders offer a certain amount of their spare money for a certain rate and borrowers just choose how much money they want for what rate is offered. There is no intransparency and no bank in between. Lenders don’t borrow their money directly to the borrower, they rather give it to a pool of people grouped together because of similar creditworthiness. A fair rating system categorises borrowers and their creditworthiness. It’s like a real web2.0 peer to peer phenomenon therefore journalists and analysts call it already the “Ebay of the financial Sector”. And as Ebay changed the retail habits and Napster the music industry so Zopa could become a serious challenger of the corporate banks. And David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners goes further and says: "What Skype did to telecoms, this could do to banks”.
Zopa has more than 35 financially experienced employees including some of the founders from the internet bank Egg. Revenue comes from 0.5% of a transaction fee from the borrower and a 0.5% annual service fee from the lender. And it’s still cheaper for the more than 90.000 registered users who already circulated some million pounds since 2005. And further markets like the USA are in Zopa’s strategic focus since many private US-households need extra money right now.
Honestly Zopa is a really interesting startup in the era of Web2.0. The application of the so called social networking to the finance sector evidences even more that the social aspect we all adore can be implemented in nearly every societal and economical level. And since you registered at Zopa it’s very possible to get a cheap loan cause Zopa means “Zone of possible agreement”.
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Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Commerce, Clubs.
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