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May 30, 2008
It looks as if all those creepy dweebs who hang around on the internet are planning some kind of world domination.
They've kidnapped our kids with MySpace and Nitto, wrecked the film industry with YouTube, sent book retailers to the wall with Amazon, threatened the garage sale with eBay, stuffed the music industry with LimeWire and made Dennis Shanahan unhappy. But is that enough for them? No, apparently not.
Now they're banking with each other.
Laurel Papworth has been watching developments in peer-to-peer lending and is delighted at the idea. In this post she finds a third Australian setup and links to previous posts. The established iGrin is here with a simple graphic of the system.
It works a bit like eBay with the bidding and reputation systems and according to Laurel it's not making the banks very happy at all. A single setup fee? No death threats for defaulters? No charges for anything under any pretext whatsoever except the agreed interest? No database sharing with junk mailers? Whoever heard of such things?
Laurel reckons Australians will be reluctant to expose their money to the high risk, but I don't know about that. Weigh up risking $100 on a fellow human being against donating it to a nasty bank in the form of fees. In the former case you might get ripped off, in the latter you definitely will.
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Nice summary of what p2p lenders are doing - its just fairer. Theres some other great examples of it overseas - prosper.com in the us and zopa.co.uk in the UK, really changing the game. We're pretty convinced its the future.