James Alexander, Zopa co-founder, on peer-to-peer lending
We visited Zopa a peer-to-peer lending company, at their central London office for an interview with co-founder James Alexander.Having arrived early for our interview, we decided to poll people on the street about their attitudes to managing their money online. We were pleasantly surprised to find that everyone we interviewed was already banking online. No one outside the IT sector, however, familiar or comfortable with peer-to-peer lending… yet.
Zopa firmly believes that in the future, more and more people will become self-reliant and will give up on institutions such as banks. Companies like Zopa will then provide secure online-based marketplaces for consumer lending (i.e. where people lend money to each other). By cutting out the commercial banks, who currently perform this function, peer-to-peer lending companies will be able to provide consumers with a better deal.
Zopa was started two years ago by the founders of Egg – a financial service firm that introduced online banking to millions of UK consumers. Zopa has received funding from Benchmark and currently has 170,000 members in the UK. It is planning to launch its US operations later this year.
James Alexander’s parting words to entrepreneurs were “believe in yourself, trust offers of help from others and realize that even failure is not as bad as you might think it is!”
… stay tuned…
blog: weareintruders.tv
Rachel Hobdell
That’s a very interesting concept.
I knew there was such a thing in the States (prosper), which seemed very amaturistic to me at the time, it was geared towards small property investors.
Rachel HObdell
http://www.smartfinanceinc.info
Rachel Hobdell
Must say the video got stuck, at about 13 minutes, please check
Great interview, would like to see all of it
Rachel Hobdell
http://www.smartfinanceinc.info
arnaud
Hi,
same thing as Rachel: the video got stuck at 13:47 and also, it failed when I tried to share it. Could you please send it to me by email?
Thanks a lot.
admin
I just watched the video in its entirety without problem, this might be due to your internet connection. Please try again and let us know. Thanks
@arnaud – I can’t send you the video by email, the video file is way too big