March, 2008

Time for some weekend reading

After celebrating our third birthday and then with two short weeks on the trot with Easter last week, we’re ready for the weekend and a bit of a sit down. We’ve also not blogged for a bit, so here’s a quick bit of reading for you on a Friday evening as you clutch your final cup of tea, grab a nice piece of cake and/or biscuit (check out nicecupofteaandasitdown for inspiration..)

Johnnie Moore pointed us towards Monevator and a recent post about Zopa and we thought it contained some food (pun intended, following biscuit reference earlier) for thought:

“Clearly, the credit crunch is having an effect on Zopa’s peer-to-peer lending market, either by:
*Increasing the number of Zopa borrowers, and so decreasing the pressure for lenders to compete via reducing rates.
*Reducing the number of lenders, and so reducing the range of offers for borrowers to choose from.
*Making lenders nervous, so we’re all raising our rates.
Plus I see a fourth, really unpleasant possibility:
More lower-quality (or even dishonest) borrowers are coming to Zopa.”

We really don’t think you need to worry about that fourth one. Our default rate remains at less than 0.1% and we’ve seen no evidence of increasing bad debt. With our state-of-the-art credit and affordability checks, we’re confident that our credit process will continue to perform well.

So, sit back, relax and have a really nice relaxing biscuit and tea filled weekend!

Chick this out

The Zopa office will be closed while we all partake in a giant Easter egg hunt. We’ve been told it will start on Friday 21st March and we shouldn’t expect to be back until Tuesday 25th. Eggs in arms, ready to get back to work.

We’ve added a couple of threads about this on our discussion boards for borrowers and lenders.

Invasion of the chicks tweet tweet

Site maintenance - Monday 17th March 2008

Today we’ll be taking the Zopa site down for around 2 hours; from 4-6pm.

While we’re upgrading our current hardware, you will be able to view general Zopa pages but will not be able to view account information.

During this time, the discussion boards and blog will be available, so feel free to chat with other members of the Zopa community until we’re back!

Online chat - 4th April 2008

We’re holding an online chat on Friday 4th April at 2-3pm. This chat will be with Murray Bailey, our UK Director of Risk.

Murray was previously Credit Risk Director for GE Capital, Citibank and HFC Bank with over 20 years experience of consumer credit risk management.

If you can’t make the time but have a question you’d like answered, please leave him a question on our discussion board here.

Nearer the time I’ll do an update post with the location of the chat.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Site maintenance - Monday 17th March 4-6pm

The Zopa site will be down for around 2 hours on Monday 17th March, from 4-6pm.

We’re upgrading our current hardware to something new and shiny and it might (hopefully) be a little quicker when we come back online.

Here’s to system migrations!

Thanks for your patience while the work is done.

The news story everyone is talking about

The papers have been full of one story today. The Budget? No. The chef that will only eat biscuits!

We tried to think of something to blog about from the budget but the biscuit eating chef was much more interesting.. Well, we thought so.

Today, the metro had the story of Andrew Foster who has a fear of food and only eats biscuits. The 27-year-old regularly munches his favourite biscuit, Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers.

He said: “I used to get through two packets of biscuits a day. When I was 18 months old, I stopped eating. Experts advised my mum to starve me as I’d eventually eat, but the only thing I’d want was biscuits.”

Talking about his job as a chef. “I’d think, “That smells delicious”, but the thought of tasting it would make me feel sick.”

We’ve all been wondering, what made him become a chef?

3 things we’ll do for our third birthday

As you’ve probably guessed by now… we’re all in the celebrating mood. It’s our 3rd birthday (have we mentioned that enough yet?), it’s Friday and… well I think that’s reason enough for some merriment!

So, I’ve been accosting people in the office, asking them what 3 things they’ll be doing to celebrate our birthday. I’ve picked out a few to share and after you’ve read our random offerings, we’d love to hear what you’ll be doing; you can post below.

Jesper -
Blowing up some balloons
Eating some cake
Eating some more cake

Pedro -
Playing keepy uppy with the balloons
Popping a balloon behind some unlucky victim
Enjoying a birthday drink

Tristan -
Putting on my birthday suit
Eating birthday cake
Taking a moment to appreciate where I work and what we’ve achieved

Tanya -
On the internet to find a nearby bakery
Buying a birthday cake for the office
And raising a glass to all our fantastic users who made something very special happen

Giles -
Trying hard to get us in the media
Taking a quiet moment to reflect on the journey so far, and think of Richard
Buying everyone a drink!

Sarah -
Wearing my party shoes
Doing a cartwheel
Eating cake

Kelley -
Testing the latest release so we can upgrade with some fresh fixes on such a special day
Polishing my best singing voice for the birthday song
Toasting Zopa with the finest of real ales

Aidan -
Updating the Zopa site to make it even better
Wondering where this cake is?
Reminding Giles about those free drinks…

Happy birthday to you

It’s not just us celebrating our birthday today, here’s a few of our members that are also celebrating being a year older(!) today.

acampbell
andrewguppy
Area13
bandrew
briarcal
bumplump
ctd2005
Delltronic
dusidog
gscas64
importer
kingsgate
liambennett
mzscorpion
PeterGA
pjnfc
scampion
soopersoo
theloaner
wadds
wally2006
zaphodb

Personal favourite ID has to be bumplump! Happy birthday to you all.

Balloooooons

What do you need at a third birthday party?

First thing we think of is balloons! what do you need if you don’t have a giant canister of helium to blow them all up? You need a Jesper!

Our Jesper took a minute to help create an impressive(!) wall of balloons. He’s having a sit down now to recover…..

Jesper

Happy birthday to Zopa and welcome Japan

Zopa is three years old today!

It isn’t just us who’s reached the grand age of 3 - today also marks the third birthday of peer-to-peer lending. We were the very first P2P company when we launched in 2005 and now, three years later there are more than 20 around the globe.

A few months ago I mentioned we were hoping to see Zopa in several interesting and rather exotic locations in 2008. Today I am thrilled to announce the formation of Zopa Japan KK, which will be led by Chairman Takeshi Yoneda and CEO Tatsuya Kuboi, both highly experienced and accomplished Internet financial services professionals. We look forward to helping even more people around the world enjoy the big benefits of cutting out the banks by borrowing and lending with other people instead.

The launch of Zopa Japan, along with the US and Italy last year, further strengthens our position as the leader in our field.

With recent average returns for lenders the best they have ever been at 8.1%, with some enjoying more than 10%, social lending has never looked so attractive. Borrowers continue to enjoy personal loan rates normally much lower than they can get from the banks, and despite months of turmoil in the credit markets, our state-of-the-art credit and affordability checks have maintained our remarkably low default rate at less than 0.1%.

Since we launched in March 2005, £20 million in unsecured personal loans have been arranged at Zopa in the UK. More recently growth has been boosted by the global credit crunch which is driving unprecedented demand for P2P personal loans as banks become less competitive and tighten their lending criteria. All of this has also pushed up returns to Zopa lenders to an all time high.

We’ve had a tremendous year. We reached 150,000 members in May, the Guardian named us as one of the “Top 10 dotcoms to watch” in July. October saw the arrival of listings , which has enabled our members to lend and borrow in a brand new way. (Remember we’re offering fee free listings today!) Towards the end of 2007 Zopa launched in the US and Italy. February 08 was our biggest ever month, with lenders enjoying rates of 8.1%. To top off our February nicely, we were listed as one of “the Googles of tomorrow” in an article in The Independent. We’ve also been short-listed for ‘Most Threatening Non-Bank Competitor’ in the 2008 Retail Banker International Awards and for Innovation in the 2008 Efma Retail Finance Awards. We’ll keep you posted on how we do.

With over 190,000 members in the UK alone and the launch of Zopa in 3 more countries, things are looking very exciting indeed for the year ahead.

Countdown to our birthday

We’re getting a tad excited here in the office. Party poppers are on standby and silly hats are threatening to make an appearance. We’ll be three years old on Friday 7th (huzzah!)

If you have 3 minutes to spare (seeing as it’s our 3rd birthday..) what 3 words would you use to describe Zopa? You can jot them down below and we’ll be featuring our favourites in our next newsletter.