CommunityLend blog

It is with great pride that we announce that the CommunityLend online peer to peer lending service is launching in Ontario today and we welcome you to join us.

The CommunityLend online peer-to-peer lending system aims to satisfy three essential market needs in Canada:

- Helping Canadian borrowers get better rates for their loans through a competitive and empowering process for borrowing money.
- Providing eligible Canadian investors, starting with Accredited Investors, direct access to Canada’s lucrative consumer credit market as an investment category.
- Providing local communities the opportunity to positively influence the lending process for their members by highlighting their collective needs and responsibility.

It’s been a long road for us to get here as my colleague, Colin Henderson has noted in an earlier post, but that long road has made our launch just that much more exciting for our team as we begin the process of build this new market category of Peer to Peer Lending in Canada.

Just in case you missed it, we recently made a number of announcements leading up to our market launch today regarding some new team members and the addition of a new investor and partner for CommunityLend. This is an exciting time for CommunityLend and we are keen to have you join us.

To set expectations properly, we would like to update you on four relevant information points related to the CommunityLend market launch today.

- We are accepting only Borrowers and Lenders resident in the province of Ontario. While it is our full intent to offer a national peer-to-peer lending service over time and to ensure that every region of our great country can have the opportunity to participate in this new lending model, we are restricting participation to start with to only Ontario residents. If this doesn’t apply to you right now, fear not, in the coming months, we intend to add new provinces and territories and will notify you accordingly.
- We are focused only on “good quality” borrowers. We define a “good quality borrower” as someone with a good to strong credit history, reflected in their credit data held by our credit bureau partner and who is in the current financial position to be qualified for a 3 year term loan on CommunityLend. In credit bureau terms, this translates to a credit score of 657 or higher (out of 1000) and a total debt service level (the amount you pay versus the amount you make) not exceeding 30% of your income. The reason for these strict credit standards relates directly to our commitment to creating the best environment possible conducive to a strong and consistent financial return for our lenders.
- We are focused only on lenders in the province of Ontario who qualify as “Accredited Investors” under securities regulations in Ontario. You are an accredited investor if you fit within one or more of the categories listed here. Accredited investors at Communitylend can be both individual and institutional lenders. Over time, we want to make the assets of peer-to-peer lending available more widely to non-accredited investors and will be exploring methods to do so within our regulatory framework.
- These are early days for Peer to Peer Lending and we look forward to building this market category together. We have worked hard over the last 2 years to create a service which we believe meets the core market requirements for operating a robust peer-to-peer lending system in Canada while also operating in a compliant way with Canadian regulations. These early days around our launch will be our opportunity to get committed and qualifying users into and using the system to get valuable market feedback. This will likely mean that not every loan request will get filled and not every lender will get to build a loan portfolio as quickly as they would like. We expect these situations to be short term in nature and we know that by working together, we can make peer to peer lending a strong viable alternative to traditional bank lending.

Starting today, if you are a borrower looking for a better interest rate for an unsecured loan, an Accredited Investor looking for the opportunity to participate directly in the consumer lending market or a community who believes you can do better by working together, there is an alternative now available here at CommunityLend.

We invite you to join us in helping to change the rules of lending in Canada. Just follow this link to get started now!

- Michael Garrity, CEO and Co-Founder