Zopa skips over the rest of the Americas and stops in Japan?

Just a tid-bit of news for those that haven't been keeping track, Zopa is continuing their ambitious expansion plans by moving into Japan . Which I found a bit surprising, since, well, when I think of Japan, I think of everything being completely different, and I'd imagine that banking would be no different. I think a big issue in one of their last elections was what to do with their Post Office, since it is one of their largest deposit-taking institutions. Their personal savings rates used to be quite high, around 25%, but has been falling drastically recently . I guess the Japanese market is relatively high-tech and uncharted in P2P lending, but I can't help but wonder why they decided to just skip over Canada... Perhaps our regulations are that sufficiently different than everywhere else, which is a bit unfortunate. 

On a whim, I decided to test canada.zopa.com and ca.zopa.com. No luck :( 

IOU Central's "Pro-forma" Meeting With Regulators on March 6th

As stated in the BDRVM's decision here, there was a "Pro-Forma" meeting on March 6th with the AMF, IOU Central and anyone from the public present. With the meeting being held in Montreal, I couldn't make it. Not sure if anyone else has, there hasn't been any news on it (not on Google News anyway). 

I'll be the first to admit that I had no idea what "pro-forma" meant. I know that "pro" usually means (latin-wise) first or "pre" or something like that, but anyways, here it is from Wikipedia: "Pro forma court rulings are intended merely to facilitate the legal process (to move matters along)." That is their definition for what it means in a legal context.

My email to Sam Bendavid, IOU's VP of Business Development, was that it was simply that, a meeting where "not much happened" and was just to clarify some issues. Nothing on the BDRVM's website about the meeting unfortunately. 

Communitylend Meeting

A little while back (I think it might've been 1.5-2 weeks ago) I had a meeting with Dave Coleman of Communitylend, their Community Manager (or some such, he seems to do quite a bit of work for them in varying fields). Not to be confused with the other "Dave" that posts here. I've certainly been meaning to do a writeup, but the IOU Central "Limited Functionality" thing and school have been keeping me away from this too much, plus my procrastination. It'll be coming shortly, and although there's some things that I can't say, what I can say will still definitely be worth reading.