Jose del Moral writes about it: we now have a Zopa or Prosper for Spain, it’s called Comunitae and it has just received 2 million euros of investment from the fund Entrinnova.
The founders of Comunitae are Jose Miguel Rotaeche and Arturo Cervera, two ex directors of BBVA who since June of this year are working to bring to Spain the model of P2P bank or bank 2.0, whatever you would like to call it. The launch of this community of loans between individuals is scheduled for mid 2009.
Comunitae will do an analysis on each one of the loan requests and will classify them in function of their risk. The lenders will bid for the loan requests as for them participating in the community is an opportunity to invest. The managers of the community recommend the lenders to diversify their investments by categorizing loans on different levels.
The service of Comunitae also is considering helping non profit entities to obtain funding in favourable conditions, and for that they will be creating the option of groups.
Without doubt we are looking at a very ambitious project here, with an important investment. We will be keeping an eye on its development and the appearance of possible competitors. In Spain we already have the experience that within a short time of an idea succeeding in other countries, we see various similar projects coming into existence.
