Lending money to strangers

Very frequently, banks refuse a loan because the people asking for it do not fit the criteria the bank fixed. What results from that is that those persons then look for another way of financing their projects, where they don’t have to show all their past, if they ever have been under a banking prohibition and so on. What they want is just to explain their plans and find a quick and regular way of financing them.

I think the website Prosper.com is an answer to that need. It is just the expression on the Internet of the loans that have existed for centuries. Many societies have been created when the banks’ criteria to a loan have increased and that life coast has increased as well. Haven’t you been harassed by those companies, calling you, sending you mails at home, or even putting adds on TV and on shops ? I guess this website is just one more way to make a quick loan, an extension of what already existed.

I am not sure we can really talk about trust or generosity. To my opinion, it is more relevant of the rigor of the banking system that adds to people’s breathlessness on the one side, and of the will of other’s to earn money with their economies, choosing who they’ll lend it to, how much they’ll lend and how much they’ll earn, having in a sense a feeling of power, on the other hand. I also think that if fees didn’t exist in case loaners are not paid, and these are high fees compared to those in a ‘normal’ bank, the system would not work. All those reasons make me quite suspicious about a so given trust or generosity. I personally think that the only trust is the trust on the repression that can be launched in case on a non-payment.

Other websites make a loan online possible. You have for example the website Interactive Investor on which you can make a loan to a bank. Some other websites give you the possibility to borrow or lend money without going through the bank system. You have for example another American website doing this: Zopa.com. This is quite the same process as on Prosper.com actually. I guess more sites like these will appear in the future, just because it’s easier, quicker and people do not have to fit given criteria and just explain what they want to their loaner. I guess little by little, everything will get easier. But this is still dangerous to apply to these, as banks’ criteria are not the fruit of the fate and you can never know how many other loans your borrowers have already contracted.