How did you come across peer lending?

An article in Moneyweek magazine a few months after Zopa launched around ten years ago.  At the time, I had only recently moved to London from the North West and concluded paying down my (offset) mortgage was the better option with surplus cash.  Only started investing with zopa in 2009 once I'd more or less cleared the mortgage which meant I mssed zopa's annus horribilis (2008) and had my thoughts clear on the potential benefits of p2p by the time FC and RS launched in 2010.

What a lovely way to cement a relationship!

Don't be crazy.

My intro to p2p was from my son who was earning 9% from ZOPA. Fun while it lasted, but the 'improvements' to the lending proposition drove me away.

I probably learned of Zopa via editorials and monitored their forum for perhaps a year before signing up in 2008 around the time they were going to raise the lender charge from 0.5% to 1% (it's now handled differently).

I mentioned it quite a bit at MoneySaving expert and that might have contributed to Martin doing his experiment and the subsequent article on the site that has been mentioned. Might have, I don't know, the timing just happens to work. In 2009 I was interviewed for BBC MoneyBox in my local BBC radio studio via a link to the London one but none of it ended up being used on air. Probably useful background for them, though.

More recently over at MSE I've been mentioning other P2P and VCT options that do secured lending to people who don't know about the interest rates that area available. I've also been helping out a big SIPP vendor with their research into whether to make P2P available on their platform, what risks they need to watch out for and and what to offer. I'm content to introduce people to newish things that offer good deals.

If you can get it, almost nothing beats editorial content. The chief barrier for newish places is that now there's a degree of editorial comfort with the longer established brands, even though the lending for some is unsecured, so there's that obstacle to overcome. There's also a lot of ignorance about what P2P really means and its risk level, with people writing about it all being high risk compared to say unsecured corporate bonds or shares. I've done some fairly long posts about it over at MSE to try to clear up some of the preconceptions.

The thing that beats editorial is personal recommendation from trusted friends or commentators personally known to the person considering it. Next best might be a long term contributor to MSE suggesting taking a look, complete with caveats and how to do it at lowest risk - diversification and such.

I tend to refer newcomers to this place a lot. Make sure it doesn't go away, it's a useful marketing tool for all newish P2P firms and actually all, given the broad level of lack of knowledge about even the well established ones and how they handle risk reduction.

I hope the site was of some value. At the time there was nobody else writing about P2P unlike now!