Social Lending - How it Works

04/12/2009 by bill.

Social Lending is a smarter, fairer and more human way of doing money. It’s like borrowing and lending with your friends and family - except there are thousands of people you can lend and borrow with.

Both lenders and borrowers get better rates, because Social Lending is more efficient than the traditional banking model. Banks have massive overheads, with thousands of employees to pay and hundreds of branches to maintain. So they have to take large margins on the money that passes through them.

There’s no smoke and mirrors here. Banks user your money to make even more money for themselves . They lend some of it out, gamble some of it on the price of tin or the Yen depreciating, and invest the rest in any other money-making schemes they can think of.

Whereas at Zopa, people who have spare money lend it directly to people who want to borrow. There are no banks in the middle, no huge overheads and no unethical investments.

Zopa lenders offer some of the lowest rates around, but only lend to highly credit worthy borrowers.

More about Zopa

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