Customer participation at the heart of P2P Lending

Why suggestions from you are the key to constant improvement.

(This is an excerpt from a full post published on the P2PMoney blog)

Back in November, I wrote a post about how P2P finance fits into the model of collaborative consumption – otherwise known as the sharing economy for the blog over at P2PMoney.

I made the point that collaborative finance didn’t necessarily need to equal ethical finance, social lending or any other type of ‘do-gooding’. Whilst some of the by-products of crowdlending might very well be good for the wider world (local lending for instance), most investors are in it for the returns, for the chance to make their cash work harder than it would do left in a straightforward deposit account. And that’s absolutely fine.

That doesn’t, however, break the link between P2P finance and the sharing economy. One thing that unites most of the new peer industries that have popped up over the last few years is participation. Peer based businesses need people to participate, whether that’s using someone else’s couch as a bed for the night, sharing a car or borrowing a Boris bike or participating in P2P finance.

By participating, I mean more than simply transacting. After all, transactions happen 24/7 in banks around the world. Participation is about contributing something more to the project, connecting with fellow users or participants and actively trying to make the overall experience more efficient and rewarding for everyone involved.

To read the rest of this article, visit the p2pmoney blog and to start crowdlending with FundingKnight, register as an investor or borrower via the FundingKnight website.

P2P to be regulated. Next stop, a change to the regulations on the treatment of peer to peer losses.

Last week’s news that peer to peer lending is about to be regulated by the FCA was met with pretty unanimous support from the industry, with both borrowers and lenders and the peer to peer lending platform owners themselves all agreeing that regulating peer to business lending is likely to boost rather than stifle peer to peer finance in the UK.

So that’s one battle won – or at least the first round, no doubt there is a whole host of further debate to come regarding exactly what shape the new regulation takes…

In the meantime, however, there’s an existing regulation that peer to peer lenders want changed – and that’s the treatment of losses.

Whereas banks and other financial institutions are able to off-set bad debt against interest earner, peer to peer lenders are not under current HMRC rules.

This is not only unfair but fundamentally compounds the impact of any peer to peer losses.   P2Pmoney.co.uk has helpfully crafted a suggested letter that anyone who agrees that the current state of affairs is wrong can cut and paste and send on to their local MP.

You can find the letter here on the www.p2pmoney.co.uk website.