Online Loans a Revolution for Australian Borrowers

As a new year approaches all of us here at the Lending Hub team wish you all the best for the festive season and a prosperous New Year. We have been working hard to get Lending Hub up and running so that very soon you wil be able to join our community and visualise peer to peer lending and borrowing first hand in Australia.

By the time we launch we launch we hope to have developed Australia’s first and only true online loan service. At the moment as far as I know nobody offers a complete end to end online lending platform for Australians (or New Zealanders) that manages the ID (identify) verification, credit checking, collation of personal details and issues the loan online in real time, as opposed to taking the personal information offline for processing later.

The main banks appear to not be actively pursuing an online loan format as this is not part of their core target market which is a consumer with bricks and mortar assets, extremely high credit rating and unlikely to be part of the first wave of users for new internet-based services (i.e. these are the more ‘traditional’ consumers). The first adopters of new online products are services are often younger and potentially ‘less credit worthy’ in the eyes of a traditional bank hence any online loan service will need to cater for differing credit ratings and credit histories.

The other factor affecting the progress of lending into an online loan format is the slower rate of progress and general uptake of the online digital industry in Australia as compared to the US and UK. With the expected proliferation of broadband and continued acceptance of online businesses by mainstream consumers we will likely find a growing demand for online loans in the next 3-5 years.

So as we stand poised to enter 2008 all of us at Lending Hub look forward to bringing you a revolutionary new online loan services that we hope will start a change in the way forward thinking institutions do business with their online customers.

Have a happy and safe New Year and see you again in 2008!