Hi Julia, Zidisha seems to be serving a valuable need.<p>I had designed and developed a credit exposure and credit risk management for large corporate and commercial banking for a large Canadian bank and I am curious to know how credit exposure and risk is managed by Zidisha.<p>a) what collateral do you accept and how do you value the collateral?<p>b) do you consider country risk ? and how do you quantify individual's risk profile ? have you developed a credit risk model ?<p>c) would you consider offloading credit risk by partially securitizing your loans?<p>d) Countries where you operate in have a serious risk of document fraud. can you share stories of fraud mitigation ?<p>f) finally, what kind of lenders do you seek ? Are you looking for altruistic people or people seeking to spread their investment risk ?<p>e) Also, do you realize that you have the opportunity to become the Equifax of third-world countries ?
Can this be approached as a (low or high risk?) investment, from the borrower's perspective, or is it mostly about helping third world inhabitants without any substantial ROI for borrower?
I like the concept of P2P microlending, especially enabled by technology, so the loan sharks can be kept out of the system.<p>But to really be sustainable and have a high-impact (as a tool for economic growth in the 3rd worlds, not as a business per se), it should be more localized. Think at something like localbitcoins.com - as a working system - ignore the bitcoin part of it. This way you can get rid of the most of the taxes and decrease the level of fraud.
Oh great. Payday loan sharks meet Wall-street meet the developing world. The whole concept of microlending is based on the free market fantasy that poor people can build their own businesses and be self reliant, as if market entry barriers don't exist. As if a weaver investing in a manual loom does not face the competition of textiles industrially produced in China for pennies.<p>The financial sector jumped all over microlending: it's a virgin market for financial services ("the unbanked"), the default rate is low because the existing social structure is leveraged (like MLMs, Amway etc.), and the profit potentials are huge. Meanwhile, they can claim they are helping people and the nasty effects of this type of loan sharking take place in a far away country to people who can barely understand they are victimized.<p>Poor people need jobs and education, not high interest loans that will just finance survival. The developing world will increase it's standard of living the same way the West did: large scale efficient production, ran by educated and productive workers earning wages and creating demand. It will not be via a bunch of banana cart pushers.