Micro lending sites - Kiva.org - the borrower perspective.

Yesterday I looked at Kiva.org from a lender perspective and it all seemed quite rosy.

A couple of clicks as a lender and you are done.

There is more to this than meets the eye though.

If you click on the option to learn more a dedicated page is opened with emphasis on the borrowers story and the loan length.

In much smaller writing you can only see that the loan has already been made, there is an currency exchange risk and the borrower is paying interest. You have to drop down the V to see more detail.

Wow, now that's a whopper. The interest rate is 49% per year.

Plus there are all kinds of loss percentages.

No wonder at these kinds of repayment terms.

We will give kiva.org 10 points for transparency, but you have to be prepared to dig for it.

Selecting the repayment schedule you can even get right down to the nitty-gritty of details

But even that does not add up so well

No interest is shown in the calculations there and already the lenders have taken a 17c loss on exchange rates so far (which is minuscule sure) but illustrates that principle.

So clearly there is more than meets the eye of the lender in this case. Kiva is transparent but perhaps a little short on upfront disclosure by seemingly hiding the finer details.

But, one can also understand them wanting to shield lenders from complexity and make the lending process as quick and painless as possible.

So the next question is just who exactly is being funded? Will look deeper into that question next time.

All pictures in this post are screengrabs taken directly from the kiva.org website for illustrative purposes.