ABSTRACT

In recent years, we have witnessed considerable worldwide success in peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, and there is a remarkable trend for provisioning credit via P2P lending platforms. For example, Zopa, the first company in the P2P lending space, was initially launched in the UK in 2005 and has since lent over £900 million (Akkizidis and Stagars, 2016). According to another study (Huang et al., 2016), the number of Chinese P2P platforms reached 2589 by the end of 2015, and the annual turnover for 2015 was totalled at 982.3 billion RMB. In addition, in the USA, P2P consumer lending accounts for a lion’s share of market volume (reached a record of $21 billion in 2016) (Ziegler et al., 2017). Meanwhile, more and more governments, e.g., UK (Nesta, 2012; Baeck et al., 2014; Baeck and Collins, 2013; Zhang et al., 2016a; White Label Crowdfunding Limited, 2016; Collins and Pierrakis, 2012), USA (Gajda and Mason, 2013) and China (Deer et al., 2015; Stern et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2016), are actively embracing P2P lending platforms due to their unique ability to make loans available to poor people and opaque SMEs.