Another way of looking at this , from a competitive standpoint, is as a vote aggregation market (think "Wisdom of Crowds" or Google's internal voting market), one of the problems with lending and borrowing (in fact the biggest problem) is assessing the creditworthiness of the borrower, in some sense what Zopa and Prosper are both doing is disaggregating the voting, no longer is it one banker on a credit committee or a single FICO model, it has the chance of being a startling efficient way of aggregating individual opinions on a borrowers credit risk, at a minimum it is a very interesting experiment to determine which model is the smarter one.
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Another way of looking at this , from a competitive standpoint, is as a vote aggregation market (think "Wisdom of Crowds" or Google's internal voting market), one of the problems with lending and borrowing (in fact the biggest problem) is assessing the creditworthiness of the borrower, in some sense what Zopa and Prosper are both doing is disaggregating the voting, no longer is it one banker on a credit committee or a single FICO model, it has the chance of being a startling efficient way of aggregating individual opinions on a borrowers credit risk, at a minimum it is a very interesting experiment to determine which model is the smarter one.
Already available from Corestreet for Firefox and IE http://www.corestreet.com/spoofstick/