This week, Veecus, a new microfinance lending platform launched its beta version.
Veecus is an interactive platform allowing all members of the network to browse projects of microentrepreneurs and personal pages of users and lenders. Veecus also provides you with your personal space online and your own blog.
Veecus offers the possibility for lenders to choose projects depending on:

• the total amount of the loan requested by the microentrepreneur for their project
• the description of the project
• the duration of the loan
• the reputation of the partner microfinance institution
• the location of the microentrepreneur
• the interest rate associated to the loan

Veecus is run by a french limited company, run and owned by the co-founders Clément Carjat and Baptiste Fabre.  For those of you who like Kiva and myC4, Veecus offers a website in both French and English, giving a more international feel to microfinance lending.

For more information about Veecus and other P2P platforms visit P2P-banking.com

At last week’s Clinton Global Initiative, former president Bill Clinton announced the launch of Leapfrog Investments. Leapfrog will invest in local microinsurers who provide insurance services to BoP clientele. (website)

Muhammad Yunus stated at a recent microfinance event, “Microfinance still works. [it hasn’t been] hit by the meltdown process.” If he’s right, and I have not seen any statistics to back it up, then the safest loans to invest in over the last few years would have been the sub-subprime loans. (full article)

I think (hope) you’ll agree with me that this new Schwab Charitable initiative is an exciting development in the microfinance world.

Schwab Charitable, one of the country’s largest and fastest growing nonprofits and facilitators of charitable giving with over $2 billion in assets and $350MM in annual grants, announced today the launch of an innovative microfinance guarantee program. It is the first program of its kind to enable donors to set aside a portion of their Charitable Gift Accounts to guarantee microfinance loans to the world’s poorest entrepreneurs to start, maintain or expand small businesses. Guarantees are different from direct gifts to microfinance in that funds may never have to leave a donor’s account. The new program is designed to allow donors to maximize their charitable impact by putting donated dollars to use as a microfinance guarantee while they are still held in their Charitable Gift Accounts and invested for growth and future granting.

[Hat tip to Dave Schappell at TeachStreet for the e-mail he sent me this morning]