‘Members’ category

Now we are two.

Posted by Dave at 11:45 am

“Happy Birthday dear Zopa, happy birthday to us!”

Crikey - was it really 2 years ago that we pushed the button on the Zopa website, and opened it up to lenders and borrowers for the first time?

A quick check of the BBC news site or the Daily Telegraph suggests quite strongly that it was indeed.

That was a mad day - we got far more publicity than we thought we would get - radio, press, online and TV - and we got a little submerged in the flood of visitors to the site, but the site stayed up, and Linda and her team battled through literally thousands of emails and enquiries.

A lot has happened since then (much of which has been recorded on this here blog) - the site has changed beyond all recognition (take a look at what we looked like when we launched, courtesy of the Wayback machine), we’ve launched new markets, new features to help people lend and borrow, opened an affiliate scheme, won an award, opened to up Zopa Powerlenders, and admittedly, screwed up at least once.

We also had to endure the tragic loss of an inspirational leader - Richard Duvall, who died last October. Although this was obviously a huge blow for us, we’re confident that Zopa will continue to grow and succeed both in the UK and internationally, and become a fitting monument to Richard’s vision and leadership.

I’ll finish this little post with a personal thank you to every single Zopa member - you’ve all made something that was once an idea, and then a Powerpoint presentation, into a living, thriving community of lenders and borrowers who are slowly changing the face of finance. We’ve a long way to go, but we’ve made a great start. Thank you.

Posted in Team, Members | 1 Comment »

Get yer Zopa mug….on eBay

Posted by Dave at 11:21 pm

OK - so someone clearly wasn’t as enamored of their Zopa Christmas present as we hoped they would be!

Check out this eBay auction and see if anyone has decided that they are prepared to stump up for this genuine (with certificate of authenticity!) piece of Zopa history

:)

PS. Thanks to Sir Tenly Skint for spotting it and letting us know!

Posted in Brand, Members | 2 Comments »

Thai Zopa

Posted by Dave at 1:48 pm

Deddington took his Zopa mug all the way to Thailand, and kindly sent us this photo.

Apparently, pina colada tastes better from a Zopa mug…

Anyone else got photos of Zopa gear in exotic places?

Posted in Brand, Members | 1 Comment »

Zopa on TV (Properly this time!)

Posted by Dave at 11:28 am

We’ve just had confirmation from the BBC that (subject to no huge breaking news story) we’ll be on the BBC1 6 o’clock news tonight.

Obviously we’re expecting a wave of interest as a result - so this is a great opportunity to get your money on the markets and get it lent out. If you want to top up your money at Zopa today - give us a call on 0207 636 7712 before 6pm - or go online and fill in your details.

Brace! Brace!

Posted in Sales and marketing, Press, Members | No Comments »

The morning after…

Posted by Dave at 12:02 pm

Q. What do you get if you take 97 Brahma beers, 8 bottles of wine (the white was better…), 9 big plates tapas, 25 Zopa t-shirts, 6 Zopa people and about 30 Zopa members - and put them all together in a cool bar on London’s south bank?

A. A really great evening! (and a minor hangover the following morning…)

Thanks to everyone who came along last night, we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did! It was really interesting to talk to so many Zopa members, all of whom had their own reasons for coming to Zopa and trying us out. We got lots of feedback about what we’re doing right and wrong, what people like and don’t like - and I was able to put some faces to familiar names on the discussion board

I’ve uploaded photos onto Flickr so please feel free to download them if you’d like - a few are below, click through to see the full size versions, or browse the whole set

Posted in Members | 5 Comments »

It’s not a Dreamcatcher, it’s a piece of String (3rd Guest blog)

Posted by philipg27 at 9:42 am

philipg27 is a lender at Zopa, sometime contributor to the Discussion Board and an habitual moaner about the design of the Zopa website. [His words, not mine! Dave]

Recently I was listening to a comedy program on Radio 4. In one sketch there was a Professor who cynically dismissed a number of “new-Age” ideas. As part of the sketch the Professor referred to his book “It’s not a Dreamcatcher it’s a piece of String”. Whilst the sketch itself was not a classic the title of the book stuck in my head.

Why is this at all relevant for Zopa? Well my blog piece is a bit of comment about the nature of Zopa, and re-working the book title I thought this piece could be called “It’s not a Community it’s a Market”.

I’ve previously seen Zopa referred to as a community, in the same way that the micro-credit institutions in the developing world work at a community level. For me Zopa fails to pass the two tests I would have for a community.

1. The two parties (borrowers and lenders) know each other.
2. There are shared communal values that encourage the repayment of debt, and conversely would stigmatise any borrower who failed to complete repayment.

I am a lender at Zopa and there is clearly no way, or mechanism, that requires me to know any of the borrowers at Zopa. Regarding the second test I’m not convinced that any borrower at Zopa feels more obligated to repay a P2P loan than any other “commercial” loan. I suspect that the main motivators for borrowers to repay loans are both honesty, and the need to maintain a good credit rating.

As an aside I guess the most likely group of Zopa participants to be capable and willing to form a community would be the Lenders, but such as situation would probably result in raising of the rates at Zopa and accusations of operating as a cartel!

The other “myth” I want to comment on is the reference to Zopa as the eBay of P2P finance. I don’t agree with this. eBay is a brilliant example of natural, highly scalable, monopoly. The more people that use eBay the greater is the incentive for both sellers and buyers to use eBay. In addition as a company eBay requires relatively little addition investment to host the second million auctions than the first. Contrast this with Zopa. Zopa will never become the single source for individuals to lend and borrow money, if only for the reason that most people probably prefer the safely of collective lending, such as via a Building Society” where the problems (and risks) of an individual defaulting are hidden from the lender.

A better analogy for Zopa would be the insurance market that Edward Lloyd set up in his coffee house. Here people met and did business, thus creating an insurance market. In fact this analogy is even better when you consider the actual mechanisms employed at Lloyds of London. As well as providing a “market'’ for buyers and sellers to meet Zopa provides two additional functions that mirror the market at Lloyds (Or at least as I remember them from my time there in the late 1980s).

Firstly Zopa itself provides the function of assessing the risk of each and every loan, in the same way that the Lead Underwriter at Lloyds would assess the policy being requested by the Insurance Broker.

Secondly Zopa provides the matching mechanism to bundle a set of loan contracts by the Lenders into a single Loan for the Borrower, in the similar way that the insurance broker at Lloyds would go around the Syndicates at Lloyds until the policy was fully underwritten. As an aside Zopa demonstrates almost perfectly what an ‘O’ level Economics student is taught about markets, at least on the supply side. When the price goes up the amount of money available to borrow goes up. Zopa even publish copies of this information on a weekly basis.

Having banged on about Zopa being a market I should finish by commenting on why this is important. Well most importantly for Zopa the message is that Zopa should be working towards making the market easy to use rather than attempting to foster a sense of community. The website is notoriously difficult to use, it should be as simple to use as my online-stockbroker, and provide me with enough information to make informed decisions on the most effective options to lend money. I don’t really need need pictures of people jumping over mountains whilst baking bread I need cash flow statements, better reporting and maybe even some idea of what’s happening to my loans being processed that are currently lost in the Zopa Triangle …

Posted in Members, P2P, Guest blogger | 5 Comments »

DIY Zopa!

Posted by Dave at 5:22 pm

A little while ago I wrote a post that talked about what the blog and discussion board were for. In the comments to that post, we got talking about a Zopa wiki. (Wikipedia link on wiki’s)

I thought it might be a good (and at the very least, interesting) idea to create a Zopa wiki that was a space for us and our members to help answer questions that other members have about Zopa.

Of course, we already have a Zopa help section but in my opinion, it’s not that great! After all, it’s just our opinion about what questions our members might have, and it’s our attempt at answering our questions.

So - as a trial, I’ve created the Zopa wiki!

As I mention on the discussion board thread it does look a bit dodgy at the moment, but if it takes off, then we’ll upgrade to make it look like the rest of Zopa, get rid of the ads etc etc.

Please go and have a play - you’ll need the wiki password (zopawiki) to edit pages, but that’s all.

Have fun!

Posted in New stuff, Members | No Comments »

New, improved Zopa: Now washes whiter!

Posted by Dave at 10:50 am

As you may know, we’ve been working away on a new look and feel for the Zopa website - and we thought it was about time we invited you in to give your views on where we’re ending up.

Below are a couple of mock ups of what the Zopa homepage and Lending homepage might look like - have a click through to see the full size images.

Although we love the existing Zopa site, there are a lot of problems with it. We’ve found the graphical language and layout very constraining - for example the silhouettes are hard to bring to life. They’re supposed to represent our members, and the human side of Zopa, but they don’t do it very well - which means we have to use lots of copy to convey the humanity and warmth of Zopa. And no one reads copy online

Also, we only really have a way to represent data in a tabular format - and for many people that is hard to interpret - we need a way to show lots of data in a graphical format.

Another problem, familar to many weary lenders in particular, is that the site has had more and more crammed into it as we’ve added functionality over the last year or so - and it’s creaking at the seems. We’re simultaneously looking at making a lot of the site simpler and more useful - but it’s hard to do that inside the current, sprawling, design. (There’s a post coming on this soon!)

Finally, we wanted to remove the barrier between the active (transactional) pages, and the non active (brochureware) pages…and to make it easier for non members to see ‘inside’ Zopa.

So, when we sat down to come up with something better, we had a series of requirements. The new site would have to be:

• Open and transparent - allow anyone who visited Zopa to immidiately understand what was going on and what Zopa was about
• Simple
• More engaging and human, and something that showed our members better than the silouettes we’ve been using to date
• Expandable - it would have to work in the UK and the US, and allow for future expansion of the Zopa proposition

So what are the main changes we’re making?

Well, most obviously there’s a new look and feel to the site - hopefully it feels a bit more modern and grown up, and also makes it more obvious what we’re about - money and people. We’re introducing new colours to be able to distinguish different areas of the site: a purple for the (new) community area (blog, discussion board etc.) and blue for the signed in transactional area (We’re told blue is a credible financial services colour… )

The space at the top will be an interactive area where it will be possible to see what’s going on in the markets directly from the homepage - without joining or logging in - breaking down the barriers and letting visitors ‘play’ with Zopa before they join up.

We also have a new system for visualising our members - the little characters at the top of the home page are avatars that represent each and every one of our members, and will evolve to allow us to show specific groups and communities within Zopa.

Overall, we hope the new layout will be simpler to navigate, have less copy, fewer routes for people to travel down and generally be a worthy sucessor to the design that has seen us through our first 15 months.

What do you think?

EDIT: You can also join in the discussion over on the, very well named, Zopa discussion boards. Ta.

Posted in Changes, Brand, Design, Members | 10 Comments »

Opening up Zopa data

Posted by Dave at 7:14 pm

You might not have noticed, but over on the discussion board we’ve been talking about the new Zopa API (v0.5!). An API is a a way that third parties (members, other organisations etc) can access Zopa data without coming to the Zopa web site and signing in.

The first baby steps on this path have been taken - we’ve taken the data from the marketplace screens and made it available via a URL as XML data. In future we want to allow members to access their own data this way (with security in place) and eventually, to allow people to transact at Zopa, from outside the website.

We’ll be extending the range of data available over this path in the coming months - but in the mean time, go have a look, and see what you can do with this new tool.

Posted in New stuff, Technology, Members | No Comments »

A blogging experiment

Posted by Dave at 4:31 pm

Late Friday afternoon and ones thoughts turn to the blog, and how little has been written on it recently. (A recurring theme I know…)

I want to try something new.

While most of the Zopa blog content will continue to come from me (and whoever else I can beat into writing from the office) I would love to post some contributions from you - our members.

I’ve floated this past a few of the more active members on the discussion board, and got a warm response, so I thought I’d open it up a bit. If you’d like to write something on the blog (and be read by about 600 people a day!) drop me a line to dave@zopa.com and I’ll be in touch.

I can’t promise to publish everything, and the posts have to be Zopa / P2P finance related in some way, but if up for having a go, I’d love to hear from you.

Have a great weekend!

Posted in Members | 2 Comments »

Avoiding the geek trap

Posted by Dave at 11:12 pm

Josh Kopelman has an interesting post where he talk about companies that target a very early adopter community of ‘Web 2.0 geeks.’

As Zopa’s resident geek, this struck a cord. I love finding great new web sites, like Pandora, or Zillow, or Flickr. But how many of our members use them as well?

Josh’s post raises the issue of designing for the early adoptors…and whether by doing so, a company runs the risk of alienating mainstream consumer.

Zopa definitely has a core of early adoptors - we did a survey about 6 months ago, and we asked a sample of our base whether they used various web sites or web technologies (RSS, blogs, eBay etc) - and I was astonished at how tech savvy many of our members were.

The challenge for Zopa, and any other Web 2.0 company, is to move beyond this early core, and attract a more mass market crowd…but to do so in a way that doesn’t ‘dumb down’ too much for the geeks.

We’re doing it through research - both with a mainstream audience and some of our most active members, and as a result we’re trying very hard to build a web site that balances both needs.

Our aim is a site that offers two levels of interaction with Zopa. A very simple, quick and easy route to lend (or borrow - although we’re focused on lending really here), and a much more involved route - with access to data, RSS feeds, analytical tools etc.

This isn’t something we can do in an afternoon, but you should see the signs gradually over the coming months. Let us know how we’re doing, and please, if you think we’re about to fall into the chasm, throw us a rope.

Posted in Technology, Members | 2 Comments »

It’s good to talk (to our members)

Posted by Dave at 5:11 pm

A few weeks ago, Justin and myself had a really great evening.

Not by ourselves, I hasten to add (Lest our our better halves be reading), but with a group of Zopa members.

I organised a ‘Zopa member dinner’ - the aim of which was to gather a group of really engaged members, ply them with decent food and wine, and get to the bottom of why they were so damn interested in Zopa. We had members who log in daily (Even i don’t do that!), members who have been in regular contact with us practically since we launched, and members who have commited large sums of cash to lend to complete strangers.

I had to investigate. And I needed a wingman.

So, the wine flowed, the conversation was great and the evening passed all too quickly. I’ve got pages of notes written up about all that we discussed, and we’ll be working some of the ideas that were mentioned into future development work. Many, many thanks to those who came. And to those who didn’t - there will be more!

What I was most amazed at though, was the number of questions these members still had about Zopa. People who have been members for a year, and log in with amazing frequency, still had so many things they wanted to ask, or check up about, or just get clear on.

So what must all the other members be thinking and asking and unclear on?!

The upshot of all this is - we’re thinking of providing some form of Q&A session with the Zopa team, and I want to know if you think that’s a good idea.

I’ve started a discussion thread about it over here but you can also respond in the comments in the blog if you’d rather.

Hope to talk to you soon! (And see the previous post for more communication related ideas as well.)

UPDATE: The link now works. Thanks philipg27!

UPDATE2: Justin has pointed me to a good little article on communities. Worth a read.

Posted in Team, Members | 3 Comments »

Skyping Zopa

Posted by Dave at 5:22 pm

We’d love to be the next Skype (Well, wouldn’t you?), but in the mean time we’ve finally got ourselves Skyped up - and much hilarity in the office ensued as some of the less technically literate of the team struggled with such advanced concepts as headphones. (Hello Giles!)

Anyway - we did it to cut down our communications costs between the UK and US offices, but if anyone fancies a chat with me please feel free to:

If you want to get in touch, please do, and if you want to add me as a contact you can do as well - but put something about Zopa in your contact invitation or I probably won’t accept you…too much dodgy Skype spam otherwise!

Posted in Team, Technology, Members | 4 Comments »

Weekend musings

Posted by Dave at 11:21 am

Regular readers (Are there any of you out there?) will have noticed a hiatus in blog posts over the last couple of weeks - apologies.

2 main reasons: Firstly, I’ve been in San Francisco working on our US launch which isn’t conducive to spending a lot of time writing away on the blog, and secondly we’ve been thinking about a ‘blog strategy.’ (Words to strike fear into the hearts of any blogger I know….but bear with me.)

You see, this blog thing is actually quite popular. It gets about 500-600 visits per day, and it’s grown more popular every month since I started it back in September. But we’ve never had a particularly clear idea what it’s actually for. (And anyone who suggests it’s just a space for me to stand on soapbox and vent to the world can leave the room. Now. Thanks.)

So (I am getting to the point, I promise), all a blog strategy really means is - working out what we want to do with the blog, and doing it. Simple right?

This is where I’d love you to come in - what would you like us to do with the blog? What do you like, what bores you to death? If you were me, what would you do?

To get you going, here are a few questions and thoughts…

• What are the different roles (and rules) of the blog and the discussion board?
• How can we expand the conversation about P2P finance outside of Zopa?
• Is it right for the blog (i.e. me, and other Zopa bloggers) to have an opinion on things, to take a stand, more explicitly than Zopa as a company?
• What would you like to see the blog used for:
  • Information about things happening at Zopa
  • A perspective on the wider world of P2P finance
  • Stories from the Zopa team and Zopa members
  • Something else?

I’d love to see the Zopa blog continue to grow over the years, so setting the direction now is important.

Can you help?

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded a short powerpoint on my thoughts about all this - you can download it here. Thanks for your comments so far.

Posted in General, Members | 20 Comments »

A delicate balancing act

Posted by Dave at 1:20 am

The discussion board has been busy since we announced the introdution of fees last week, and I thought it might be worth linking to a an Economist article that seemed relevant.

The article is about pricing decisions in two sided markets - of which Zopa is one. The problem arises when a company is trying to appeal to 2 sets of potential consumers, for example:

Microsoft, for instance, knows that everyone who buys its Xbox 360 adds to the console’s appeal to independent game publishers. The games these publishers conjure up then make the console more attractive to other customers. This makes Microsoft’s pricing decision tricky indeed. How much it charges one side of the market—people who play games—has a knock-on effect on demand on the other—people who develop them—which has, in turn, an indirect impact on the first side. This … is more difficult than “setting the price of toothpaste”.

We have a similar problem - if we only charge borrowers (our initial model) then we end up with unattractive rates for borrowers…and hence unattractive rates for lenders. If we only charge lenders, then we end up with unattractive rates for borrowers. You see the problem?

We don’t know for sure that we’ve got the right answer (Indeed the intensity of debate suggest we might well not have), but we might have to suck it and see. The Economist admits “Economists are still learning how two-sided businesses set their prices, and they still don’t know where the see-saw should settle.” For once, I feel like an economist.

Posted in Changes, Members | 1 Comment »