P2P Money Blog

Okay lets admit it - banking and money has to be a pretty dull subject.  Contrast that to something like eBay where you are bidding on a item that you want and you are offering a fair price.  There is a certain amount of satisfaction when you win.

With the like of Funding Circle you are also in an auction.  You are (for example) offering £40 at 9.9% (before fees,tax and bad debt) and the deadline is approaching.  There is a frantic rush of lenders trying to undercut each other, knocking off higher rates one by one.  The auction closes and you find that you have "won" lending your £40 at 9.9% !

Not all peer-to-peer lenders operate the auction (listings) model, as some such as Zopa and RateSetter prefer to rely on a market, however there is still some excitment when you find out your lending offer has been successful.

Check out the latest rates on peer-to-peer lending to see how you can make your money work a bit harder.

Following on from the Funding Circle rebranding, and as we previously reported last year, YES-secure has announced that it is to rebrand as "Encash".  Here is their statement on their forum:

YES-secure is coming up with a transparent social lending platform with scintillating new look and easy-to-use UI, as "encash".
The enhancements are termed as the re-branding of YES-secure.
The Press launch date is 1st March 2012.
For more details on the launch visit the link below:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9168177.htm

When we have any more information we'll let you know, but certainly the new logo is an improvement on the old one.

Funding Circle has launched a new skin and logo for their website after brief testing.  Here is what they said in their latest email:

Welcome to a fresh, new look for Funding Circle. 

We've just launched our brand new website so log on now to see what has changed. We have included some new features and changed the site navigation to make it easier for you to use. We're really pleased with it, and hope you are too, do let us know what you think. All your details including log in remain the same.

We also think it looks good, and while we liked the old skin and logo we have to give them full marks.  The colours are clear and distinctive, and the pages are easy to read.  Well done !

Full story »

I was pleasantly surprised to see that YES-secure have now published their loan default data for 2010 and 2011.  I've been busy going through the maths and have double checked the figures, and I can publish the actual lifetime default rates.  This information will be uploaded to the P2P Money comparison of peer-lenders later.

• The A+ market had £112,860 lent with a total of £25,407.94 of defaults.  The lifetime default rate would be 22.51% against a target of 3.0%.
• The A market had £56,930 lent with a total of £13,119.91 of defaults.  The lifetime default rate would be 23.05% against a target of 4.0%.
• The B market had £106,940 lent with a total of £10,913.42 of defaults.  The lifetime default rate would be 10.21% against a target of 6.0%.
• The C market had £81,840 lent with a total of £3,763.59 of defaults.  The lifetime default rate would be 4.6% against a target of 8.0%.
• The D market had £67,480 lent with a total of £3,895.19 of defaults.  The lifetime default rate would be 5.77% against a target of 12.0%.
• The E market had £41,170 lent with no defaults.  The lifetime default rate would be 0.00% against a target of 25.0%.

There seems to be quite a disparity with the default rates, with the lower risk markets experiencing large defaults, and the higher risk markets experiencing fewer or no defaults, although less money was lent.  Again there must be a word of caution with stating lifetime default rates so early on in a loan term as some loans won't be mature enough to have defaulted yet.

The overall bad debt would be 12.22% against a predicted weighted average of 7.96%.

Lending rates on Funding Circle have started to rise as they now have 33 loan requests running for a total of £1.8 million.  I myself managed to get a loan rate of 13.8% for a B graded company only last week.  If that wasn't incentive enough for new lenders then (as mentioned previously) there are various cashback offers available for both new and current lenders.