New community and not-for-profit lender to launch in March

Two former accountants with PWC and

KPMG

plan to launch a new peer-to-peer lender targeting small businesses, community organisations and charities. Called Our Money the new lending platform intends to launch in March and its chief executive is

Derek Butler

, an accountant with PWC who later worked as country director for

Goal

in

Haiti

.

Sean O’Riordan, an associate director with KPMG who worked on the liquidation of IBRC, is Our Money’s chief operating officer. “We both wanted to apply our skills to getting money moving in local communities again,” Mr Butler said. “For example we will look at helping local GAA clubs who have many local supporters who are prepared to lend them small amounts each at low or even zero interest rates, but need a structured safe way to do so,” he explained.

"There are tonnes of money but it is stuck inside our broken banking system. We have developed a platform for people to lend to small businesses or not-for profits that they can trust," Mr Butler said. Our Money is in the prices of raising €2 million, Mr O'Riordan said, in order to roll out its services faster.

Sufficient funding
He said Our Money had sufficient funding to begin trading in two months' time. PWC is the lender's auditor, KPMG its compliance advisor and Beauchamps its solicitors.

"We have eight developers working on our first products split between Spain and Dublin," Mr O'Riordan said.

Small team
Mr Butler said that since setting up last summer, they had build a small team around them. John O'Callaghan, former head of credit with Postbank and chief executive of the Irish Country Women's Association, is working with Our Money on lending policy and David McCreery, a risk management expert who previously worked with CR2, a banking software company, is also an advisor.

Mr Butler and Mr O’Riordan are behind an online social network campaign called ’anewbankforireland’ which has been asking people what they felt was missing from Irish banking. The two men said the experience of running this campaign had given them valuable ideas for new products.

Crowd funding in Britain is now a £1 billion a year business having only started in 2005. Ireland has only one peer-to-peer lender called Linked Finance. Crowd-funding expert Simon Deane-Johns, the co-founder of the world's first peer-to-peer lender Zopa, predicted this month the market for such lending to small businesses in Ireland could grow to €100 million in three years.