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This month we share some important news about our domain name, speak to one of our first listings borrowers and hear the news from Zopa Italy. |
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Zopa is launching in the US very shortly and this means lots of Americans are going to type in uk.zopa.com or zopa.com, expecting to see the American website. So we're going to move the UK zopa.com site to uk.zopa.com, and the americans will be living just next door at us.zopa.com. Our clever technical people have set up a very sensible solution which means that when people type uk.zopa.com (or zopa.com) into their web browser, it automatically finds out which country you're in and redirects you to the appropriate site. What does that mean for you? Not a huge amount, really - you can carry on using uk.zopa.com or zopa.com and if you're in the UK you'll automatically get redirected to the new uk.zopa.com address. Naturally, if you type uk.zopa.com into your browser you'll end up in same place. Occasionally you may find that you get redirected to the 'wrong' site. There's 2 ways you'll know which site you're on: the first and most obvious way is by looking at the top of the page and seeing which flag is highlighted (there'll be three - UK, US and Italian). The other way is to look for oddly spelt words such as color, defense and publicize and to count the average number of exclamation marks on the page. Why are we telling you this? Zopa members are a sharp bunch, so there's no way that you wouldn't notice the change of address. What we didn't want any of you to worry about was that there might be some dubious shenanigans going on, or that it might be some sort of phishing site. If you're at all worried, or have any questions feel free to drop us a line at contactus@zopa.com. |
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More than 500 of you have used listings since our launch just one month ago. One of the very first people to create a loan listing was Jesper Garde. He is a very nice chap. We know him very well because he works for us! And you will all be pleased to know that Jesper is already busy working on some improvements to Zopa Listings for the New Year. How long have you worked for Zopa? I joined Zopa in August this year. ...and what do you do? I'm User Experience Designer, which means I do a lot of the design of the Zopa website. You have recently used the new Zopa listings to get a loan, what was that for? We're running out of storage space at home so we decided to make the loft more accessible and suitable for storage. Why did you choose listings as a way to borrow? Apart from my mortgage and agreed overdraft I've never borrowed money. Sorting it all out online without having to talk to a bank was very appealing to me. How did it compare with other rates? I always intended to pay back the loan in 3-6 months so to be honest I didn't do much comparison. The convenience and ability to pay back early without penalty was more important. Did you get the rate you were after? I ended up with a rate of 9.3%APR which I believe is competitive and it feels good that the interest is going to 'real' people rather than banks. How was the experience? I know I'm biased, but I thought it was really exciting logging in to Zopa each day to check how many new lenders had bid on my listing. Do you want to say anything to your lenders? Thank you for trusting me. As I said I intend to pay back my loan early so in 3-6 months time you should have all your funds back so you can lend to someone else. As a Danish football fan, do you have any tips for us Brits on how to handle the disappointment of not qualifying for a major tournament? No I don't. It hurts the same every time... but there's only 10 months til the World Cup qualifiers begin ;-) |
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The prosecco has been flowing at Zopa HQ in the last few weeks. We are delighted to announce that Zopa has launched in Italy. If you want to take a look please go to www.zopa.it for more details. Our US business will be following shortly so watch this space! We asked a few questions to Zopa Italy supremo Maurizio Sella on their launch: Please tell us about yourself, family, interests etc Married to Ondine (architect), 2 daughters (9 and 7 years old) 1 son (4 years old) 1 (big) dog ...Sports: Ski, tennis. Interest: contemporary art What did you do before? 20 years in finance (asset management) mainly in London with Citibank and a few years in Switzerland and in Italy with the Julius Baer Group What attracted you to the idea of Zopa? Although I always dealt with “big” money, I always thought that the real business and personal interest was in retail finance. In addition I read Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank several years ago, and was very impressed! What makes you think it will work in Italy? Personal loans are growing considerably, as well as the use of broad-band and the internet in general (online travel booking, eBay is now the largest second-hand car dealer! And many other examples). Last but not least, banks and financial companies are very expensive, so there is some space for Zopa. How long have you been working on it for? Almost 1 year full time, but more than 18 months part-time How have the media reacted to your launch? Impressively. We have got article and interviews in all major news websites, on some newspapers and economic magazine, even an 8-minutes interview in one of the more listened radio programs. And all this with no classical press release or press conference. We just found the way, we started the chain reaction through an exclusive interview to repubblica.it, the most important news website- just to understand its power in a few hours we got 12 thousands visitors How many people have you signed up so far? Since when? From June to the launch we reached 2,600 newsletter subscribers; after the launch we have more than doubled this figure. But what is more important, in a week we have about 100 lenders active who have already deposited money in Zopa. I need to explain one important thing, the site is open only by invitation and we are at the moment inviting only lenders - we have profiled them with the newsletter - in order to create liquidity. When do you think you will do your first transaction? Before end of November we will start to invite potential borrowers, so I hope to have the first contract signed in a few weeks. Is there anything different to the UK? We are starting with the “classic” Zopa with fewer markets. Listings will be a second step, we want to see also your running experience What has been the most difficult part of the project so far? Difficult choice, I would say the regulatory and fiscal issues. We have spent a lot of time (and money) with our legal and fiscal consultants What has been the most fun? The rush of lenders to get into the first "100 hundred - no fees for ever" promotion. There was people asking us if they had the time to take a shower without risking to be out of the first 100s Any interesting stories from the project? The creation of a parallel community through the creativity contest, www.zopacontest.it, started in September and now at the end. We have received a lot of ideas and creativity proposals from more than 300 participants, we have had a clear sign of what is the expectation of web people, while keeping alive the expectation of Zopa. And now the two communities, Zopacontest and Zopa, are mixing up. How do you think we can improve our business in the UK? Implement a secondary market for Lenders |
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If you prefer not to receive communication like this from Zopa, no hard feelings. Email contactus@zopa.com to let us know. Just so you know it's us, your username is ###. |
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Zopa Limited. |