Chewing the fat, shooting the breeze, having a natter - call it what you like, talking to people is darn important and everyone should do it as often as they can (except in libraries). We talk to our members as much as possible, through our blog and discussion board and by getting people to email contactus@zopa.com if anything's on their mind.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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…
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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.
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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…..
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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.
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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.
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What a great start to the day. The sun is shining, we are all unscathed after the earthquake last night and to top it off; today Giles appears in The Independent!
According to The Independent, we are one of “The Googles of tomorrow”. In an article which appears in the paper today Robert Jones, director of brand consultancy Wolff Olins explains the next generation of brands. “We’re too well-informed and too sceptical to believe in image. What brands have to do in the future is not create a big idea that people buy into, but be useful for people. The days of pure consumerism in the classic economic sense are over. Consumers are also creators, who interact with brands such as YouTube, and who make ethical rather than purely financial decisions when they’re buying things. This is the age of the post-consumer. There’s a French word for it: ‘consommacteur’.”
Giles goes on to explain “We took a practice that has been going on in communities around the world for centuries and created an online opportunity for it. We connect creditworthy borrowers with people who have some money that they would otherwise have used as investment funds or savings. By connecting the two parties directly, rather than via a bank, we can offer significant economic savings… We diversify a lender’s funds by dividing the full amount they want to lend into lots of mini-loans, and every loan a borrower receives is made up of contributions from lots of lenders…. “We’ve probably built a better-performing credit model than anyone else in the country because our bad debts are so minimal – less than 0.1 per cent.”
You can read the full article written by Tim Walker here and if you buy the newspaper, you even get to see a picture of Giles. That’s got to be worth a trip to your local newsagents!
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We saw an article today which tickled our funny bone. There appears to be a spate of malfunctioning doors hitting banks around the country. The latest sees a man being locked in his bank for over an hour and a half. This comes after a 5 year old boy walked into a ‘closed’ bank 19 hours after it was supposedly locked up for the weekend.
Next time you go into your bank, remember to take some supplies; you could be in there for a while!
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The web has revolutionised pretty much everything and continues to do so, and ever since day one (and clearly for a good few days before then) at Zopa we’ve believed that the future of money is human and involves using the web to do things better. That’s why we’re particularly happy to see that a recent research report from Gartner predicted the following:
“By 2010, social-banking platforms will have captured 10% of the available market for retail lending and financial planning.”
That’s just two years away. Now, we’re very nearly three years old (more on that to come) and in those first three years we’ve seen Social Lending (or Peer to Peer Lending as it’s also referred to) firmly establish itself as a new way to lend and borrow money in many different countries around the world.
Since we launched back in March 2005, we’ve grown substantially in the UK and gone on to launch in Italy and the US. As more and more people realise the potential of Zopa (and other similar companies that have since launched), then that 10% figure seems even more likely to us – especially given the relentless trend towards transparency and the ongoing struggle of the big banks to become so.
Obviously James over at BankerVision cast some doubt over the prediction (he works at Lloyds TSB !!!) but with encouraging blog posts today from Johnnie Moore and Anthony Mayfield (who also looks at the extent to which Zopa is being talked about over at Money Saving Expert and predicts a ‘tipping point’ for us soon in the UK) – we’re feeling particularly chuffed and excited today so we thought we’d share that with you.
Here’s to 2010 and 10%, maybe even more!
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We’re loving the idea of this - a new system in the Philippines that lets mobile users share their credit with each other and top each other up if they are running low. Using technology to enable human beings connect with each other and exchange valuable things? Hmmm . . . . that feels very familiar doesn’t it?
“Globe allows its users to send (via SMS) their phone credits or “loads” to others running low. The service costs PHP 1 (about US .024) for each transaction and is available to prepaid and postpaid Globe subscribers. Donors simply contact an automated number, punch in their pin code, the recipient’s number, and how much money they’re giving and both parties are notified upon receipt”.
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There has been a wide array of intriguing stories coming out of the Credit Crisis and I thought I’d share one which has more than a little irony…
Our biggest competitor - the banking industry - has just delivered the biggest boost to the Zopa business to date.
Yup, the very people we are trying to cut out to offer borrowers and lenders a better deal have been very busy driving both to us in record numbers.
The banks’ overzealous drive to expose themselves to debt – here or in the sub-prime markets of the USA – has caused the credit crisis and even led to a run on a British bank. Stock markets have been plummeting around the world and much of it is due to the scale of the banks’ mistakes.
So private investors, nervous of further falls are busy trying to find a more secure home for the money they are withdrawing from equities. A greater number than ever before are coming to Zopa because here they can get virtually risk free returns of 7% to more than 10%.
And because banks are desperate to find every way they can to recoup the losses they have suffered, they are putting up the rates they charge on loans and credit cards. This is making loans at Zopa look even cheaper than they normally do. So an increasing number of borrowers are flocking to Zopa to get the better personal loan rates we have on offer.
Having our major competitors driving up the number of both borrowers and lenders that come to us has just led to our best January ever. Sometimes, in the rather weird world we are now living, help comes from the most unlikely sources.
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