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Jul 13 2009

News from Zopa Italy

Posted by Giles at 10:39 am

This is a rough translation of an announcement on the Zopa Italy homepage: ”On 10 July 2009 Zopa Italy was notified of the cancellation of its licence to operate as a financial intermediary (106) by the Ministry of Economics and Finance, by indication of the Bank of Italy. As a consequence Zopa Italy has stopped issuing new loans and accepting registration of new lenders. The company is evaluating all initiatives, even at judicial level, in order to protect its position and its community. Zopa Italy will keep you informed on all activities put in place to safeguard an innovative, ethical and social initiative that bring benefits to all participants.” In the UK we are very confused by this notification as Zopa Italy sought regulatory approval from the Bank of Italy and received the appropriate licence to operate before launch. We understand that there was an inspection by the Bank of Italy more recently, which highlighted some issues that Zopa Italy believed it had addressed/could address, only for the notification to arrive without further discussion. That seems very strange - we will keep you posted with developments. This clearly has nothing to do with our regulatory position and ability to operate in the UK, but it is still very disappointing that our colleagues have to deal with this in Italy.
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This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 comments

Mario

Posted on July 14th, 2009 at 9:47 am

A quibble based bank system fight back!

paolo

Posted on July 16th, 2009 at 1:40 pm

Again,they did not forgive Zopa Italy’s unique sin: Success

Temjin

Posted on July 17th, 2009 at 1:52 am

Obviously, the central banks there do not want you guys to compete with fundings. They hate free market ideas! I really hope you guys could make it there, and as well as Australia. I’m looking forward to it one day.

ciccio

Posted on July 23rd, 2009 at 12:35 am

In italy we are scared by internet even more if ur goal is to
share money..competition is a problem for the italian banking system. mamma mia!

but italy could be the begining…

Ed

Posted on July 25th, 2009 at 12:31 pm

My professional compliance experience of the Italian regulators (Bank IT and CONSOB) is that they are fair and thorough and could teach FSA a thing or two. Zopa Italy must have done something to upset it – what are these issues you are talking about that the regulator was concerned about?

I have decided no to lend via Zopa as a result of this issue until matters are clarified further.

CoogarUK

Posted on July 31st, 2009 at 5:48 pm

Giles, Just how would you describe Zopa’s “regulatory position and ability to operate in the UK”, other than unregulated and (for the time being at least) privately funded?

Further, should the FSA (or whatever regulatory body eventually replaces it) decide that Zopa needs regulating in the UK, is it not likely that Zopa UK would end up going the same way as its American and Italian cousins have done? Presumably, Zopa Japan will now never get off the ground?

Is Zopa not potentially yet another prime (excuse the pun) example of how lax the UK financial regulatory regime is?

I feel that the position has now shifted somewhat so that the risk in investing at Zopa currently outweighs the reward and mainly for that reason, for the moment at least… I am out.

(CoogarUK has been a lender at Zopa since June 2007 but never with enough overall confidence to substantially increase his original £2.5k investment)

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