One of the more innovative web apps around has just gotten another big injection of funds, and a new CEO to boot. Zopa describes itself as a “marketplace for Social Lending”, where people lend and borrow money with each other – sidestepping the middleman, i.e. banks. They recently advertised for jobs in their new America operation (in San Francisco) and celebrated their second birthday.
Zopa’s new CEO is the former CEO of San Francisco-based Chela Education Financing, Douglas H. Dolton. He is understandably bullish on Zopa’s prospects:
“Zopa is the most innovative concept I’ve seen in my 13 years of being involved in loan businesses […] I expect it to be the fastest-growing company I’ve ever led, because of its outstanding consumer proposition: amazing rates on financial products, and a strong, safe person-to-person connection that promises to change the way U.S. consumers think about money.”
Well he would say that…. but there’s something about Zopa as a web company that is very attractive. It is very web-native, definitely innovative, and it routes around institutions that have enjoyed too much power over ordinary people for too long – banks! Phillip Riese, Chairman of Zopa, says about the US expansion:
“Our UK peer-to-peer business is now well-established and growing rapidly and we are poised to launch in the US, an even larger opportunity for the company.”
R/WW normally doesn’t cover VC news, but the fact that Zopa is heading into the US market with an innovative financial web app – is something that caught our interest. It already has over 135,000 members in the UK (whose average age is 37 apparently), so it looks poised to make a splash in the US.
Thanks Emre for the pointer. Any of our UK readers used Zopa? If so, we’d love to hear your opinions of the service.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)