CommunityLend Meeting

Probably around 3 weeks ago I had the chance to have lunch with Dave Coleman, the Community Manager of Communitylend. We tried to keep everything low-key, I don't think either of us really went in with prepared questions or answers, but rather just enthusiasm to meet and learn about the company and industry. And in full disclosure, the cost of my lunch (perhaps under $15, definitely under $20, including tax, tip & drinks, in downtown toronto no less) was covered by Dave/CommunityLend. I guess my laziness in writing this up has been due to the "situation" involving IOUCentral which happened soon after, and then some fun midterms in subjects such as Toxicology and Therapeutics.

The company is based in Toronto in the Adelaide and Peter area (I wonder if they wander in at 3am on friday nights ever), and I'm attending UofT St. George, so it wasn't a difficult meeting to plan in terms of logistics, and I'm sure there will be more meetings in time.

The team they have sounds kinda interesting, with both old-school bankers, and younger developers.

Their current investment funding (ie: to the company, not for loaning out) is what Dave still considers to be "Angel" funding, which is, in his terms, money from a dude with lots of money and connections that wants to get into something new. This is as opposed to venture capital, where the investment is moreso "invest and exit". Of course, the dividing line is fine, and I'm sure others have different definitions of the two, and that's great too. Right now, they have funding from UK, US and CDN sources.

Screenshots and Recommendations

Luckily, they were willing to trust me with some confidential info, so I'll have to be a _bit_ careful with what I say. I was able to see some demos with Lorem Ipsum articles, and it looks like they have put a lot of work into their UI in making sure that it is usable, light-weight and intuitive. Dave was very open to suggestions in all of the screenshots that were shown to me. For example, I recommended that they change the title of "Dashboard" to something like "My Account". I know that many people do think of the dashboard as, well, a panel showing everything that you need to know, but I had the feeling that the word doesn't mean much to a lot of people on a computer, at least not right away.

I also recommended some type of parametric searching, where you can search loans with multiple variable parameters. In other words, if you want to find all borrowers that have rates between X% and Y% with credit scores >Z, you can do that, rather than having to sift through everything yourself (or using some sort of 3rd party utility/application). We'll see what happens, but it is nice to see a bunch of bankers actually listening to potential customers before launching something (which is probably rare). As well I made some colour-coding suggestions, which in retrospect, might not have been the greatest idea, but ah well.

P2P Lending Regulatory Affairs

Since they are going the "regulated" route, the red tape is really bogging them down (you can see that they even have in-house counsel). I'd imagine that they don't want me to divulge the total number of licenses that they've applied for, but it even surprised me. On the plus side, it probably has allowed their team to tweak away at the interface and make sure everything is setup on the technical/media/support side for a smooth launch (again, they've told me a date, which seemed pretty certain, but I'll have to keep that one to myself I think). As well, they were working on social network tie-ins and rich internet applications, which I guess shows that they're trying to remain creative in their "regulatory free-time". As well, it looks to me like one of their identity verification mechanisms is among one of the better ones that I have seen (without saying too much :) ) and extremely relevant to this kind of industry. My guess is that their delays have been due to just having to wait for clearances longer than expected or finding out they actually need _another_ license. Like I've stated before regarding IOU Central, the current banking and securities laws really weren't designed with ideas like this in mind (or the internet), so just about everything is a grey area (my conclusion, not their's).

Disclaimer: Many of the terms are in quotes because I'm just inventing new terms, rather than those were terms that were actually stated in the meeting.