Zopa - P2P Money Lending
I always like to find on the net positive stories about friends and people I used to work with. The latest is a fantastic interview with David Nicholson, one of the co-founders of Zopa. David and I both started our careers at the same strategic management consultancy firm within a few years of each other.
Zopa is I think a unique service that matches people who want to lend money with people who want to borrow money, and it makes money by charging borrowers 0.5% of their loan amount, and the lenders a 0.5% annual service fee.
It’s an attractive way to borrow money as the matching usually results in borrowers getting a better loan rate than they would from a bank, and lenders a better return than they would from putting their money into a savings account.
In the interview David gives some background on how he came up with the idea:
“I was looking at eBay, and thinking how would it work if eBay did money,†says Nicholson. “If you went on eBay and sold £1,000 to someone, and asked for it back in a year’s time with interest. But of course you can’t do that on eBay – money is one of the long list of things you can’t sell on there. And that fundamental idea fitted well with the group of consumers that we’d identified.â€
I think Zopa’s a great idea and future applications or markets could include other financial products e.g. mortgages, insurance packages and credit cards.
If you’re looking for some inspiration for starting up your own business then this is definitely a good interview to read.
More: Techscape
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