Eric's Credit Community

After much waiting and a few false starts, loanio (a new p2p lending outfit) has finally launched. This is something that I’m especially excited about as I have been consulting with Loanio CEO Michael Solomon about the site for going on two years now. It’s great to see this finally come to fruition.

There are a few new features on Loanio that I really like. The Co-Borrower feature allows borrowers to add a co-signer to their loan. For lower credit borrowers, who have access to a co signer with better credit, this can give them a much better chance of funding, and hopefully less risk for the lenders as well. Another feature on Loanio is the “partial funding” feature that allows a borrower to accept a loan even if it doesn’t get fully funded (subject to a minimum of 35% funded). This should help many kinds of borrowers (especially consolidation type loans where something is better than nothing) and reduce the frustration caused by re-listing. It should hopefully help lenders as well by getting their funds in play quickly with fewer bid refunds due to unfunded listings.

Loanio is still a brand new platform and missing some of the things I’ve gotten used to on Prosper (e.g. portfolio plans). I know many of those features are currently in development (as well as some very cool brand new things..) and should come on line once they are ready for prime-time.

Looks like they are having some launch-day website hiccups as well..  I’m told to try using “https://www.loanio.com” rather than the regular “http” version and it should work.