The P2P lending minefield

Social lending has been in the news a lot in the past few months. Canada's first P2P lending community launched in February, and was promptly shut down pending resolution of some regulatory issues. As of today, the IOU Central platform is still "operating with limited functionality".

This week has seen some more interesting news on the P2P lending front. On Monday, Lending Club announced that they would suspend the ability to invest using their site, while keeping the borrowing functionality intact. Yesterday, I received an e-mail from CommunityLend, stating that they are getting close to a launch, and are asking for input on forming "borrower groups", presumably to assess the demand for loans so they can attract sufficient investors when they launch.

I imagine that, given the issues that have hit IOU Central, CommunityLend is being extra cautious, trying to avoid any false starts. This seems to be a prudent approach to take, particularly in such a new and untested (at least in Canada) industry. I'll be keeping an eye on this site; I have a feeling that when they open their doors, things will get interesting.

Here's the text of CommunityLend's e-mail:

Hello and Good-day from CommunityLend

If you are new to the CommunityLend mailing list, welcome to the family and thank you! Your support means everything to us. If you have been around for a while, you will remember that about four months ago we sent out an email with a few major announcements, including our funding and expanded team. We have kept relatively quiet over the past ten months while we have been consulting with the Canadian regulators. At the beginning of April we decided it was time to begin the ramp up to our launch.

Today we want let you all know that our site has received a major overhaul. The new look and feel is based on our launch design and we would love to hear what everyone thinks!

As you may have guessed we are now getting close to launching our service. In the next few months we will be regularly posting on our newly launched blog and making important announcements in our press release section. Our most recent announcement is on the formation of our Board of Advisers. We are very excited to have so much active support from such a fantastic group of people.

We would also like to draw your attention to our expanded management team, which is constantly growing as we move closer to full operations.

Finally, we would like to request that anyone who is interested in setting up a borrower community on CommunityLend contact Dave Coleman, our Community Advocate. Communities can be a great way to connect with people who share similar interests and help each other out financially. Examples are ethnic groups, interest groups, or even industry groups that want to use CommunityLend as a way to help finance their clients; the list goes on. If anyone is interested in starting a community, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Please note however that at this time, we are looking for borrower groups only. We will hold off on the creation of lender groups until our regulatory applications are approved and we are closer to launch.

Once again thank you for your interest in CommunityLend. Your help and support is invaluable!

-The CommunityLend Team