Toronto-based CommunityLend announced today that it has chosen to work with Strategic Information Technology Limited ("SIT") as a strategic service partner.
CommunityLend will be using Portfolio Plus, a core SIT product, to deepen the functionality of its social lending platform.
"We chose Portfolio Plus because of the way it can marry a solid core banking infrastructure with the flexibility that comes from the latest Web 2.0 technologies," said Colin Henderson, Chief Technology Officer for CommunityLend. "In addition, the advanced multi-threaded messaging capability within Portfolio Plus will allow us to rapidly scale our operations to introduce new financial services products over time."
Social lending is a new but rapidly growing segment of financial services. Javelin Strategy and Research recently predicted that Peer to Peer borrowing to eliminate credit card debt could reach as high as $159 billion in North America by 2012.
"We're excited to have a business partner like CommunityLend fulfill a unique need in the Canadian market by offering the first solution of its kind," says G. Robert Leeming, President of SIT. "SIT has had a long history of helping pioneers in financial services create new markets and we will be there to help CommunityLend in any way we can."
Separately, Toronto-based CommunityLend announced today its choice to work with open source application development pioneers, Unspace Interactive. Unspace are North American leaders in the development of online applications using the Ruby on Rails development framework and have built this strong reputation by specializing in the development of consumer-facing transactional online applications. While Unspace Interactive has been working with CommunityLend for a year now, today's announcement marks the first time the two organizations have made this public.
In support of today's announcement, CommunityLend CTO, Colin Henderson, stated that, "CommunityLend is very excited to formally announce our relationship with Unspace Interactive. They are leaders in the open source communmunity in Canada and build applications around a core value system that aligns well with our own commitment to the wisdom of crowds and user-centered application development.
The financial expertise of the CommunityLend team combined with the application development leadership of Unspace Interactive will set a high bar for online social lending.