Jackie Danicki

Things are crazy busy, but I must stop to tell you all about something wonderful from the great brains behind Zopa, which is itself pretty wonderful. Here’s the Zopa business model:

Zopa lets people who have spare money to lend it directly to people, like them, who want to borrow it. No bank in the middle, no huge overheads, no unethical investments.

To minimise any risk, the money each lender puts in is spread amongst at least 50 borrowers (and likewise each borrower gets their money from a number of different lenders).

Zopa is, therefore, for people who want to be a part of something new. Who want to join a community of like-minded individuals and lend to them and borrow from them in a trusting but secure way.

Pretty cool, right? This is the sort of thing you can throw in the faces of those who say that human beings need the government or other top-down, command and control forces in order to organise useful, integral services.

But that’s another soapbox for another day.

If there’s one way for a company in a stuffy, number-burdened, heavily regulated industry to get my attention and approval, it’s by paying more than lip service to transparency and humanity. I don’t mean big banks paying creative agencies £40 million for a TV ad campaign that’s supposed to trick people into trusting. I’m talking about - to borrow a phrase from a million others who so often use it inappropriately - keeping it real.

Zopa is keeping it real. Zopa is blogging.

Zopa’s blogging not in the style of the lame, much rubbished fake character blogs from Esurance and Geico. No, they’re doing something infinitely smarter and more valuable to their customers and potential customers and Zopa itself: They’re letting employees blog. As the Financial Times said just last week:

The key to success, it turns out, is to take the company out of the picture and let the employees do the blogging.

(The FT could have written that back in 2003 if they’d had access to Adriana Cronin-Lukas, who’s been saying that since she created the Big Blog Company in that year. Just sayin’.)

So Zopa have done just that, in a voice that is all too human and real. It’s startlingly refreshing, and a surprisingly fun read.

The Zopa team obviously doesn’t take itself too seriously, and the information they’re making accessible (and searchable) to the whole world is both useful and well written. It hasn’t been touched by a PR hack. It hasn’t gone through five layers of vetting. It doesn’t sound like it was generated by an automatic press release engine.

But it’s perfect. Yep, there are commas I’d move, commas I’d add, and some words I’d change or excise completely. Whether comma nerds like me like it or not, that’s how people write. The fabulous writing and information - what some people call content - beats flawless punctuation every damn time. Love or hate the Cluetrain, one cannot deny the truth of these words:

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

Zopa, you’ve got a great voice. Glad to hear it.

Filed under: Life