Kiva Makes Repaid Loan Funds Available Immediately
Published by Ryan Calkins, | 29 Aug 2008 at 02:19 pm
Did anyone else wake up this morning to find a surprisingly large balance in their Kiva account?
One of the critiques of the Kiva P2P lending model was the delay between when a borrower repaid a loan and when the lender had access to the repaid funds for withdrawal, re-lending, or donating to Kiva. Essentially, a lender would not have access to funds until the full amount of the original loan had been repaid.
Just yesterday Kiva rolled out a new system in which lenders will have access to the loans as the payments are processed. For a more detailed description of the new system, check out Matt Flannery’s post over at SocialEdge. Why is this important? The key benefit is the increased velocity of lending. Rather than repaid funds sitting in a bank account for months, the funds are immediately available to lenders, who, I suspect in most cases, relend the money.
Oh, and if you want to hear about another exciting innovation from Kiva that rolled out yesterday, check out my post over at SeaMo about Kiva Communities .
Drew Meyers on 31 Aug 2008 at 1:57 pm #
“repaid funds sitting in a bank account for months, the funds are immediately available to lenders, who, I suspect in most cases, relend the money.”
Now, the one thing that would make this even better and more efficient would be ‘”automatic re-loan” functionality that allows me to set maybe one or two search parameters and then let kiva automatically re-loan my money out to entrepreneurs who fit that criteria. Then I would never have more than $25 sitting unused in my account.