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.
Oh yes indeedy!
Yet more on-screen attention for Zopa, but this time focusing on two of our members, Ruby and Rob, and how they’ve helped each other out.
Thanks to them both for taking the time to do this, we really appreciate it and so did all those watching by the looks of it - the website and our phone lines are busy, busy, busy!
Posted in General, Press | 
2 Comments »
Those doubting that we live in a ‘globalised’ world would do well to recognise that the Northern Rock mess of the last couple of weeks actually had its beginnings in the credit crisis in the United States.
Across the Atlantic, American lenders lent too much, too easily, to too many sub-prime borrowers. Rather than savers’ deposits, this aggressive lending was funded instead by lenders packaging up loans for sale to banks and other financial businesses, making a profit in the process.
As the lending carried on and interest rates rose, it wasn’t long before this apparent gravy train came off its tracks. Some sub-prime borrowers found themselves unable to service their debts and defaulted, on a scale large enough to cause the collapse of a number of the lenders involved.
So started the credit squeeze. And with the world as interlinked as it is now, the effects were not restricted to the US. Books of dangerous US loans had been bought by firms on this side of the pond as well – and so American sub-prime bad debt issues started to bite right here in the UK.
All this may still seem a long way from the Northern Rock. However, even though Northern Rock was not really lending to the UK sub-prime market, it was using the same ‘never never land’ technique to fund the lending it was doing (and it must be said at some very aggressive interest rates). This meant selling these loans to the same firms that had burned their fingers in the US sub-prime market. Before long no-one wanted to buy, and especially at the prices Northern Rock needed to make their margin on the low rates they had lent at.
Inevitably the crisis hit the media. For the general public, explanations involving the knock-on effect of the American sub-prime bad debt crisis seemed far-fetched, then deeply worrying. “What’s all this about Northern Rock lending out money it didn’t have? And the banks lending between each other? What about UK sub-prime? What the Hell is going on around here?”
The public had always thought that banks lent out the money their borrowers deposited, and made money by charging more interest on their loans than they paid out to their savers. A kind of self-supporting mechanism that seemed to make sense, even if people had become cynical about the profiteering games banks play as rates move around.
It’s old news that most people don’t believe banks operate in their customers’ best interests, and many believe their profits are excessive. But the public had always regarded the banks as safe. Now it turns out they may not be after all.
Worse still, the man on the street can’t actually assess how safe or otherwise they are. The way some of them operate is impenetrably complex, and seems almost deliberately so. People might have become used to hidden catches in the small print, but now they are faced with potentially much bigger problems, hidden away in the banks themselves.
All of this naturally filled the news media with huge scary headlines. Coming in on the recent memory of the Equitable Life fiasco, and company pension shortfalls, Northern Rock’s customers understandably panicked.
Reassurances from the management of Northern Rock were disregarded as swiftly as you’d expect. Similar words from the Government seemed to fan the flames of nervousness and doubt rather than help. In no time huge queues formed outside Northern Rock branches as customers demanded their hard earned savings.
Billions of pounds of withdrawals later and finally the Government and Bank of England stepped in to guarantee the deposits left in Northern Rock. The whole thing looks rather a mess. The ‘blame-fest’ has only just begun…
The banking industry is now left licking its wounds and trying to move on. But its reputation has suffered a real beating. It was regarded with suspicion by many people before. Now it has even greater issues to address if it is to rebuild customer confidence.
In order to rebuild trust, banks will have to become radically more open and transparent. And this means some of the more exotic and opaque practices - like those that caused Northern Rock’s crisis - may have to be consigned to the City’s bin. This may leave some banks struggling on the road back to reality.
Meanwhile, back at Zopa, the last few weeks have served to shed new light on the appeal of Social Lending. Since we launched we have been proud of the innovative way we have created for people to bypass banks and get a better deal directly from each other. And we have done this by lending responsibly, and not to the sub-prime market. This can be seen from our default levels of below 0.1% across all of our lending.
We have also long been proud of our transparency. From very simple, and low charges, through to letting our members see who they are lending to or borrowing from.
But the last few weeks have also highlighted another key attraction of Zopa’s operation - ‘tangibility’. It is easy to see exactly what is going on. People are borrowing and lending between each other, with Zopa making it much safer and easier to do. There’s no highly paid City Slicker buying and selling futures, derivatives, Bizarre Bonds or whatever to make Zopa happen.
Maybe this clarity and simplicity will be our most attractive feature going forward – along with the great rates, of course.
Posted in Non Zopa, General, Rates, Lenders, Press, P2P, Finance | 3 Comments »
Imagine, if you will, that you’d never heard of Zopa. A horrible though, I know. But fear not: chances are we would be brought back together by the wonders that are Internet search engines. Zopa has managed to gain a foothold on the prestigious “first page of Google results” for quite a few queries:
…not to mention:
And I’m sure there are plenty more interesting ones out there to find.
And this is quite surprising to us. We did take search into account when we last redesigned the site, but we didn’t try to game Google, or do anything aggressive.
All we actually did was: use clean HTML, have clear human-readable URLs, feed Google & Yahoo sitemaps, and make sure to use the right metadata for each page. This is all basic stuff that makes your site easy to parse. It was actually mostly done to help the blind rather than Google.
We archived this using a small in-house templating system that assembles each page from content files.
HTML is designed so that the code only marks out the semantics of the page.
⟨ol⟩ ⟨-Start an ordered list
⟨li⟩Item One⟨/li⟩
⟨li⟩Item Two⟨/li⟩
⟨/ol⟩
The user’s browser then adds the numbering and indentation to that list. The designer can add external rules through a system called CSS, but the browser decides for itself how to best fit the content to the user’s device. Clean HTML will work well on mobile phones, speech readers, and dozen of devices the original author never planned for.
Dirty HTML looks like this.
⟨br /⟩⟨br /⟩
⟨font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="0"⟩
©2003-2007 MySpace. All Rights Reserved.
⟨/font⟩
⟨script type="text/javascript"⟩
⟨/script⟩
⟨img src="http://nb.myspace.com/isf.gif" /⟩
This one doesn’t actually matter too much with search engines as they’re scanning for text. It does matter a lot for selling to older people with poor eyesight, there’s more business there than you might think.
If you look your address bar as you move around our site, you’ll see links like http://www.zopa.com/zopaweb/public/lending/what-people-are-saying.html These ‘pretty’ URLs are easier to remember and type. They’re also used by search engines to work out what a page is likely to be about.
Both Google and Yahoo have online tools that let you submit content directly to them. This is a great way to make use that your legal small print, and other important but seldom linked to content, gets indexed properly. The easiest way is to catalogue the URLs on your site into a single XML file and point Google at it. Yahoo does exactly the same thing, but with a different format. For more details see
HTML defines specific areas where you can tell a search engine directly what your page is. The ones we use are the title and keywords. Out templating system lets us set these directly on each page to make sure they’re indexed under the right words.
But the main reason Zopa ranks so highly is you. Over the years, Zopa has accumulated 646 natural links from blogs, newspapers, homepages, Italian comedians… you name it! These links represent the trust and interest of the internet.
(And they’ve probably helped us jump over a dozen other sites that were splurging £££ on link farms and consultants!)
Posted in General, Press, web 2.0, blogs | 4 Comments »
Last night we had a little drink and canapes session at Bank restaurant in London. We wanted to introduce a few more journalists to Zopa, so we invited a broad cross section of the press to come along and chat to us and a few members (Many thanks to Pete and Emma, Roderick and David who kindly volunteered their time - much appreciated!)
The evening was great fun - and will hopefully mean that Zopa will get written about (and maybe filmed for TV again!) in the near future…but around 11 o’clock, the wine and beer vanished…and cocktails started arriving.
I felt it was time to leave before things went downhill rapidly - sadly Tom failed to see the warning signs - and got home at 4am this morning.
I think he got home a bit earlier this evening…
Posted in Press, Tom | 7 Comments »
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 »
You might remember a previous post about Zopa being nominated for the Internet Innovation of the Year award at the CNET Networks UK Technology awards.
Well, we only went and won it! 
To quote the judges:
There was little disagreement over the winner for this category. Zopa brings innovation into an area of life that can make the most difference to those who need it most. At first look, the idea of open source banking - eBay for money, it’s been called - seems completely implausible. But a combination of vision, a very strong management team and the right technology has proved that the idea works, and works well. A world first that has almost unlimited potential to change the way money works for people, it’s one to watch.
And here’s the award to prove it. Lovely, isn’t it?
Ops Director Linda and CTO Tim went along to the party last night to pick up the gong. I think they enjoyed themselves.
Now we just need a trophy cabinet!
Posted in Sales and marketing, Press | 6 Comments »
With all the excitement surrounding the launch of Prosper there has been a rush of blog writing about Zopa (and Prosper) - here are some edited highlights!
Getting in before the Prosper launch is Dennis Howlett, who describes Zopa, under the title Return of the Friendly society, as a “service that straddles credit unions and mainstream banking” and is “exquisite in its execution.” We’ve often been compared to credit unions, and in some ways we see ourselves as a credit union for the 21st century. This is the central topic of a long post by Scott Patterson who argues that Zopa is still a middleman, and that the P2P model is not for everyone, but that the existence of Zopa is a wake up call to Credit Unions - but the unanswered question is who will execute their advantages?
Ho John Lee has written largely about Prosper, but talks about the potential for sites like Zopa and Prosper to extend into microfinance (in the Grameen Bank model), or into start up financing. Niki Scevak agrees with the microfinance angle and talks about P2P lending and micro finance as being “one the of best ways…of solving world poverty.”
These are interesting possibilities that we’re considering hard.
Umair Haqur also makes an interesting suggestion on his Bubble Generation blog - that there is a huge amount of value to be captured by understanding the unsecured lending market in India and China, and that Zopa (or Prosper) might be able to get access to that. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Finally, for now - Johnnie Moore has written about Prosper, and highlights their group model as an interesting development of the Zopa proposition. James and I recorded a podcast with Johnnie last Friday - as soon as it’s up, I’ll link to that as well. (Advance warning - it was recorded in a local coffee shop, so it’ll be ‘atmospheric’)
Feel free to link to other blogs in the comments - always interesting to see what’s being written about us.
UPDATE: The podcast is online - thanks Johnnie and James for coming to see us. Hope you enjoy listening to the chat!
UPDATE: Crikey, as of 13:30 GMT the podcast has made it onto the front page of memeorandum which is very exciting. There’s a lot of online discussion about Prosper which is probably contributing, but Zopa is discussed explicitly by Martin Geddes in terms of the messaging we use between members and to members - interesting stuff which I totally agree with. Also, Chad over at Tech2Point0 likes our attitude!
Hey Prosper - you out there? Want to respond?
Posted in Press | 6 Comments »
We live in interesting times on the web.
Newspapers are writing blogs, bloggers are getting paid to write, and Zopa keeps getting talked about!
A recent collection of coverage begins with Zopa making a respectable Number 8 on the Times list of things to do with yout money in 2006, not bad, we’ll try harder for the number 1 spot in next years list.
Next up in the press world was a cracking story a couple of weeks ago in the Daily Mail - a full colour centre spread no less.
Meanwhile in blog land, Yasir’s blog? describes Zopa’s business model in an economic nutshell…
Connect “consumer” with “producer” in the most efficient and economical way
…while JJeffryes on Design compares us to another interesting company, Kiva. According to their web site, Kiva
provides a new, sponsor a business option for individuals to connect with small enterprises in developing countries through flexible loans.
Sounds fantastic - good luck!
(We’ve included them in our ‘cool sites’ blog roll as well)
UPDATE: Now we’re linked from Yasir’s wife’s blog as well! It’s all going circular…. Hi Sabah!
Posted in Press | 2 Comments »
If you travelled into London over the last couple of weeks you might have seen some shady characters in Zopa fleeces standing at stations, handing out leaflets - well, don’t worry, it was only us…albeit rather chillier than normal.
We thought we’d try something different from this new fangled online marketing stuff, and actually go out and meet people…well, people going through Waterloo, Victoria and Paddington anyway.
We’re still working out exactly how effective the whole thing was*, but there was one immediate benefit - we managed to hand a leaflet to Robert Budden. And not just any old Robert Budden, but Robert Budden who works for the Financial Times, and he thought we were so interesting, he wrote a story about us.
Thanks Robert - next time we’re handing out leaflets, we’ll think of you.
* You know - number of lovely new members vs. money spent on coffees to keep us warm
Posted in Sales and marketing, Press | 1 Comment »
We’ve been putting ourselves about a bit. Again.
You might have seen a most complimentary article from Victor Keegan in last weeks Guardian Technology supplement? If not, you can read it here.
Also, if you check out the MSN.co.uk homepage today you might see a little article about us, written by the senior editor of MoneyExtra.com - Robin Amlot, who should know a thing or two about good things to do with your money!
Posted in Press | No Comments »
You know, we tell them enough is enough, but they just keep on coming.
More warm and loving press articles, this time from those gorgeous people at the Telegraph, and this weekend, from their equally adorable journo colleagues at the Independent.
Posted in Sales and marketing, Press | No Comments »
Just a quick round up of where Zopa’s been in the news lately - presented in one delightful place for your delectation.
Today The Motley Fool have decided that Zopa is a good idea after all and are recommending it to their readers - welcome if you’re one of them!
This month’s edition of Real Business magazine have an article on Zopa entitled “Zopa - it might just work”! I guess it might….
We were name checked (on page 2 if you saw it!) by the FT back in August, and Business 2.0 wrote a short but sweet piece at the end of July. A much larger piece was featured in the Register back in July as well - and they described us as being “soaked in Googlesque post-corporate groovyness” - which we like the sound of!
We were in the press a lot when we launched, and there’s been a high level of interest in what we’re up to ever since. Keep checking back here to find out who’s been writing what…one of these days we might even find someone who doesn’t like us!
Posted in Sales and marketing, Press | 5 Comments »
