Monday, April 28, 2008

P2P lending company for sale

As reported by Rateladder, there is an unknown company that has offered their newly developed p2p lending site for sale. They posted the following announcement on p2ptechforsale.com:

We are from a company that is looking to sell all rights to our proprietary P2P lending technology. Our company has been quietly in development for the past year, though have made the very difficult decision to halt launch plans for reasons internal to our team. We hold extremely high hopes for the future of P2P lending globally, and believe very strongly in the value it provides borrowers and lenders.

We have developed a complete P2P lending web application that will provide any aspiring P2P company with technology to support rapid deployment in any geographical market. We built it from the ground up, and went through extensive internal testing and went so far as to conduct closed testing with users.

...The front end is fully branded, and a sale can be made to include branding, or packaged as a white-labeled solution. Available intellectual property includes company name, logos, taglines, and a number of top-level domain names.




Over the past few months there have been several individuals and teams that have tried to build, buy and sell p2p lending sites.

  • Freelance projects - I've seen at least five different listings on freelance websites over the past couple months where people are looking for help to build a prosper clone. Here is another one posted a couple weeks ago.
  • Loanio - Loanio has been in development for over a year. We first reported on them back in July 2007. Some have speculated the current site for sale is Loanio. I admit that was my first thought too. According to my recent email conversations with CEO Michael Solomon the technology is in final testing. The regulatory challenges of launching a p2p lending company are a very difficult barrier to entry (see Lending Club and IOU Central). According to p2ptechforsale, those selling the site "are not lawyers by trade." The founder and CEO of Loanio is, however, a lawyer. He has a Law Degree from Brooklyn Law School. Loanio is scheduled to present at FinovateStartup tomorrow.
  • IOU Central - IOU Central launched in Canada earlier this year after purchasing a P2P lending startup from Denmark called Fairrates. Fairrates was built in 10 months by Arkadiusz Hajduk and opened in April 2007. They have since run into regulatory challenges and have halted lending.
  • CommunityLend - Also from Canada, CommunityLend has built a platform, team and is reportedly ready to launch.
  • SocialLendingGroup - Social Lending Group has a functioning website and tried to sell it in February but could not find someone willing to pay the $2,000 reserve.

Update: I have been contacted by Loanio, IOU Central and CommunityLend. None of these platforms are for sale.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Same here:
http://www.wiseclerk.com/group-news/technology-for-sale-p2p-lending-technology/

Anonymous said...

I guess I didn't realize at first that Rateladder's news was a paid ad.

Anonymous said...

Do you know the story with Loanio? Last I heard they were looking at a Fall 2007 launch, haven't seen or heard anything new since.

Anonymous said...

We also thought they were going to launch in January but that did not happen.

They presented at FinovateStartup last week and some are predicting that they will launch within weeks.

Their CEO is going to give me a test-drive of their system as soon as I can make the time for it. I'll post my impressions here.

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