Zopa.com is another fruit of Web 2.0 and social networks, in this case applied to the field of loans, a kind of P2P, something like 'money exchange' instead of 'file sharing'. Zopa is an acronym for 'zone of possible agreement'
Zopa is the world's first social finance company. In 2005 we pioneered a way for people to lend and borrow directly with each other online as part of our continuing mission to give people around the world the power to help themselves financially at the same time that they help others.
Launched by Richard Duvall,the creator of the an Internet bank Egg.com, with an idea of having 'Ebay Of Money'. The model is based on peer-2-peer: thus whosoever in need of money, have to reports on the website zopa.com and announced how much is the requirement, for what period under, what interest he is prepared to pay. Bidders can participate (in English) with between 10 and 25,000 pounds or more if a licensing deal. Then they deposited the money into a special account in his name and under a pre-agreed annualized and then they also determine the amount of borrowing by the debtor, in packages as small as 10 pounds.
Thus Zopa tries to bring together thousands of people who can offer and borrow money so individual and achieve a better position than the banks.
In case if you are interested to know about any Indian entity based on this concept, wait for my next post on this series, anyway its name is Rang de.
Thanks for posting about Indian site Rang De in the end. i previously didn't know about this, personally I feel in India to run such a site is quite difficult as they do not have a credit rating type of system and to be a non-profit organisation is such condition is an excellent job.
ReplyDeleteOther then social networking site like FB and similar sites, the sites like zopa, yes-secure are quite popular in the UK web marketplace, they have excellent ecommerce model, web 2.0 has really changed the way people surf the net these days.