Friday, October 26, 2007

EBay and Microfinance

Catherine Holahan reports on EBay's formal movement into microfinance, MicroPlace, which the auction giant bought last year. The difference between Microplace and existing people-to-people lending sites like Prosper is MicroPlace's focus on backing hard-working entrepreneurs worldwide ("Invest Wisely. End Poverty." screams the home page).

The commonality, of course, is that all such p2p lending sites rely on an escrow safety vehicle and a democratizing credit rating system that somehow achieves, on a far smaller and admittedly less risky scale, what thousands of loan officers at megabanks everywhere covet as a mysterious science.

Side note on EBay: they've launched Kijiji, which would seem to compete with the venerable Craigslist, the reigning king of classifieds...of which EBay owns a small stake.

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