Zopa is a marketplace for peer-to-peer lending. People lend and borrow money with each other, sidestepping the banks.

The email summary I got today gave me an overview of my interest.

Your average gross lending rate (after fee) on loans made…

In the last week is 5.1%
In the last Month is 5.1%
Since you joined is 7.03%

Zopa

Peer-to-peer 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 peer-to-peer 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 use 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.

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