In an article titled "In a Tight Market, Borrowers Turn to Peers", Nancy Trejos writes for the Washington Post about the growth in popularity of peer-to-peer lending - noting that "analysts expect the industry to grow as customers who face rising credit card rates search for new ways to refinance their debt."

Yesterday, Prosper announced the successful completion of its registration process with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). As a result, Prosper's peer-to-peer (P2P) loans marketplace "has resumed for borrowers nationwide and lenders in 14 states with others soon to follow. Prosper is the first Internet auction-based P2P loans platform to have its registration statement declared effective by the SEC — a move that marks a significant breakthrough for the P2P lending industry." READ MORE »

In a Netbanker post titled "Open Letter to SEC: Leave Peer-to-Peer Lending Alone", Jim Bruene writes an open letter to SEC Chairman Chris Cox about his disappointment with the way the SEC has dealt with US peer-to-peer lending companies while not paying enough attention to major issues such as the Madoff affair (see today's New York Times story "S.E.C. Says It Missed Signals on Madoff Fraud Case").

Bruene writes: "Your agency came to the surprising conclusion that loans made between individuals in a regulated peer-to-peer market, are securities and needed SEC oversight. ... Had these companies been left alone, journalists would be writing stories about how P2P companies were stepping into the lending void left by the turmoil in the banking sector."

Jim's bottom line: "Leave the P2P lenders alone; their open approach is an order of magnitude better than the broken regulatory model employed on Wall St."

In an article titled "Lending Alternative Hits Hurdle", Brad Stone writes for the New York Times about some recent challenges being faced by the person-to-person lending companies in the US market. Last week, Zopa announced it was exiting the US market. Yesterday, Prosper.com announced it stopped accepting new lenders pending registration of its securities with regulatory authorities. Earlier this week, Lending Club announced it had completed its registration of $600 million in securities.

On his NetBanker blog, Jim Bruene takes a deeper look at the S-1 Registration Statement filed with the SEC last Friday by Lending Club. On Friday, the company updated its website with more information about the filing.

A new Online Banking Report has been published titled 'Online Investing Communities: Will social networking revolutionize saving & investing?'. From the announcement: 'We believe social networking will eventually play a large role in online investing, and evidently we are not alone. We found 54 companies involved in investment information exchange and only six of those have monthly traffic of 100,000 or more.'

Jim Bruene's Netbanker reports on person-to-person lender Prosper.com's new marketing initiatives including its new slogan: "Let's bank on each other." More on the Prosper Blog.

In an article titled 'Where Either a Borrower or a Lender Can Be', Jane J. Kim writes for the Wall St. Journal about person-to-person lending networks (like Prosper.com, Lending Club.com and Zopa.com) and how small business owners are increasingly turning to those networks as access to bank credit has become more difficult.

Update: Jim Bruene gets this one right over on his NetBanker blog - it's actually about person-to-business lending!

Springwise notes that person-to-person lending provider Fosik has launched in Australia.

Barron's takes a look at the person-to-person lending market including Prosper.com, Circle Lending, and Lending Club.

Jim Bruene's announced the latest edition of his Online Banking Report newsletter - this issue titled on "Person-to-Person Lending 2.0: Disruptive service or market niche?".

From the abstract: "Person-to-person lending is the perfect product for the Web 2.0-social-networked consumer. Why, then, has growth been relatively slow compared to other networked services? Because it’s a difficult business. Not only are P2P lenders competing with 20,000 other financial institutions for good borrowers, the are up against thousands of investment alternatives for funds to lend, all the while waging a fierce battle with fraudsters and deadbeats. It’s not a business for the faint of heart. "

Zopa has launched what it says is "an online community that offers unprecedented benefits to borrowers and investors, by offering safe, market rate Zopa CDs to individual investors that are linked to lowering the payments of an individual borrower’s unsecured personal loans."

In an article titled 'Online Lending Gets Easier and Safer', Jane J. Kim writes for the Wall St. Journal about Zopa's entry into the US market. Rather than doing everything itself, Zopa will be "working with several credit unions to offer person-to-person loans to prospective borrowers."

Prosper.com has updated its People-to-People Lending Market Survey to reflect results through the end of September. In September, $5.4 million in loans were funded at an average loan size of $7,175. Over average over the month, 2,298 borrowers were looking for loans. A market commentary by CEO Chris Larson addressed the question of whether the Prosper lending marketplace anticipated the Fed's recent 50 basis point cut in interest rates.

Prosper has introduced its first monthly People-to-People Lending Market Survey that provides key statistics including: membership and loan volume statistics, marketplace returns; borrower rates; mix of prime, near prime and sub-prime loans, noteworthy marketplace statistics/trends and a market commentary by Chris Larsen, Chief Executive Officer of Prosper.

BankServ has announced that Lending Club's collaborative person-to-person (P2P) lending platform is built upon BankServ's Magex Payment Platform, ACH reporting and cash management solutions.

In an article titled 'Options Grow For Investors To Lend Online", Jane Kim writes for the Wall St. Journal about new web-based services enabling investors to lend money to strangers online. She reports that Prosper.com has about $60 million in loans outstanding so far this year and cites the Online Banking Report's estimate that a total of about $100 million in loans will be originated by all providers this year.

Claus Lehmann writes for Springwise about PPdai, a new peer-to-peer lending business in China saying that "PPdai primarily aims to standardize and facilitate loans between family and friends, which are more common in China than personal loans from banks."

Hiawatha Bray writes for the Boston Globe about peer-to-peer lending and how its another example of how "the Net reshapes nearly every business it touches." He reports on Zopa, Prosper, CircleLending and Lending Club - and notes that "peer-to-peer bankers face tough challenges."

James Gardner, Head of Innovation and Research in Group IT at Lloyds TSB in London, muses about personalization on his blog: "It is users themselves, everywhere else, that are deciding not only how things are personalised, but also what content should be shown in the personalised context. We can see where social finance is going when examining Mint, Wesabe and others of their ilk."

Lending Club, a Sunnyvale, California-based startup, has launched a new person-to-person lending service on the social networking service FaceBook. From the company's web site: "Lending Club is an online lending community where people can borrow and lend money, bypass the banks, and get better rates. By working together, members can borrow money more easily and at a better rate than they would get from a bank, or invest in a pool of loans at higher rates than those served by savings accounts or CDs." Lending Club is using the recently introduced Facebook Platform for integration into Facebook. Read more on the Lending Club blog.

Virgin USA has announced that it has acquired a majority stake in CircleLending, Inc., a financial services company that "pioneered the business of managing loans between relatives and friends."

Personal finance columnist Eileen Ambrose writes for the Baltimore Sun about Prosper.com - saying that "with people becoming their own publisher by blogging, or creating their own videos and political commercials on YouTube, it was just a matter of time before they became their own banks."

The Get Rich Slowly blog has an interesting post titled "What’s It Like to BORROW Money with Prosper?" written by Tricia (who also writes her own blog titled Blogging Away Debt) describing her experiences as a borrower using Prosper.com to find other folks willing to lend her money. She describes her experience seeking to borrow $3,500. She posted a starting interest rate she was willing to pay of 12%. As it turns out, lenders competed for her business and she ended up getting an interest rate of 9.9% from a group of 13 Prosper lenders.

Zopa has announced that Douglas H. Dolton, formerly CEO of Chela Education Financing, has joined the company as Global CEO. In addition, Zopa has secured additional investment of $12.9 million from its venture backers, in a Series C round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Zopa, the UK-based person-to-person lending marketplace, is celebrating its second birthday. An article in Easier Finance reports on Zopa's progress to date - more than 135,000 members have joined Zopa and, perhaps most significantly, very few Zopa members have failed to pay back their loans – Zopa’s default rate is 0.2%. More birthday celebration on the Zopa blog.

The Innovate blog written by two students at Stanford's business and design schools has posted a podcast interview of Chris Larsen, CEO of person-to-person lending company Prosper.com. "In this podcast, Chris chats with Julio and Min Li about Prosper's innovative vision, its unique challenges as an eBay platform for money (check out Prosper's cool tools for academics and researchers for performing case studies on its model), and the fine balance between the countervailing forces of transparency and privacy in the world of Web 2.0."

Jessica Anderson writes for Kiplinger.com about being a person-to-person lender on Prosper.com - saying it "offers financial rewards with a dose of good karma."

CircleLending has announced an innovative private lending product, Family Advantage that allows families to "arrange private loans that feature the benefits of traditional reverse mortgages without the drawbacks. Family Advantage loans are more flexible and eliminate many of the costs and restrictions those who need a reverse mortgage face."

Celebrating its one year anniversary, Prosper.com this morning announced a series of enhancements to its service including bringing customer service in-house in San Francisco (from offshore), enabling borrowers to gain credibility from personal endorsements by friends and family, and providing lends with six additional credit data fields from Experian to help evaluate a borrower's loan request.

Yesterday, Marketplace, a business news radio program from American Public Media, had a segment all about peer-to-peer lending - in particular about Prosper.com. A transcript of the segment is available online along with the audio that you can listen to online. The segment is introduced with the comment: "banks, credit card companies and those payday loan centers make billions of dollars every year lending us money. But why should they get all the profit?"