Step 1: Registering for an IOUCentral Account

Yesterday I was able to sign-up for Canada's own little version of Prosper.com, Canada's first operating person-to-person lender: IOUCentral. I still have some steps to complete my registration however (ie: confirming my bank account and mailing address).

Account setup was rather straight forward. They did require a Social Insurance Number, which was a bit surprising, since I thought that would only be really required for borrowing and not lending, but not a big deal. All of their users are supposed to be Canadians, so I guess they should all have SINs. They also require you to enter information from a cheque so that they can debit and credit your account. So, basically money will be added and taken out as if it were a cheque, not a bill payment or Interac transaction or the like.

Save Money: You Don't Really Need Cheques

Just a note on entering your cheque information, if you don't have cheques, you should be able to call or visit your bank to get the information they want. There's no need to spend ~$30 for a pack of cheques to get this information.

Their registration form seemed to look a bit "odd" on my laptop screen running at 1280x800, which I found unusual, but I was able to figure everything out. See the following screenshot for an idea of what I meant. No biggie though. After emailing them, it looks like this problem was isolated to Firefox 1.5 (yes, I know, I like it more than 2.0), and they have since corrected it, quite quickly might I add.

The confirmation e-mail was sent instantly (you have to log-in first and ask them to send one).

After confirming that, I was able to ask them to confirm my bank account. What they do in this process is make a very small debit and very small credit to your account. I found this a bit interesting, since companies (such as Paypal) usually make two very small credits to your account. I hope they make a deposit first, which is smaller than whatever they withdraw. Otherwise, people with $0 in their account may get hit with an overdraft/NSF fee. Even people who lend may have this problem if they don't put money in their account until they actual plan to loan. I've emailed them about this.

Now I'm just waiting to see what these amounts are to confirm my bank account. They state that it can take 2 business days, and since I started the registration process on a Friday afternoon, I'm not going to hold my breath :)

Here's a screenshot of what the IOUCentral site looks like once you log-in:

I can't start the mailing address confirmation until I complete the bank account confirmation. Which is unfortunate, because I imagine this might take a few more days. Ah well. From their contract that I click-throughed, IOUCentral is based in:

IOU Central Inc.
1 Place Ville Marie, suite 1812
Montreal (Quebec) Canada
H3B 4A9

However, they do list a different mailing address under their contact page.

Good news is that when I did send them an email (I just wanted to change my username), they were _very_ quick to reply and perform my request, and that was on a Friday afternoon, so they must be working on this whole microloan thing seriously and attentively :) Since they have launched so recently, many good simple usernames are still available :)

I'll update this when I get to the next step of the process. Stay tuned.

Random thought: Shouldn't we really call these services "People-to-persons" lending rather than "person-to-person" lending? Heh.