[huntse]

A lot of the bank-bashing you see in the press is purely based on misconceptions of what banks do. The truth is that for small person-to-person loans of this type credit unions (and that's pretty much all Zopa really is by the way-a fancy-pants credit union with a website) have always been able to lend on lower margins than banks.

Now come to me when your credit union can give you a $50mm letter of credit to cover a shipment of goods from Brazil to China. In Portuguese and Mandarin, please, because the supplier and customer both want to see it. See, banks do all kinds of things that most people don't know or think about.

They get paid for doing something people want.

[biohacker42]

I think the only thing that's kept credit unions from doing that is size. If, and this is a huge IF, a credit union like Zopa can grow sufficiently large, it could do it.

[fatdog789]

No, they couldn't, without violating their fiduciary duties to the other members of the credit union.