The offering brings the company’s auction-style model to one of the country’s most rapidly growing lead categories and augments LeadPoint’s existing UK home mortgage leads marketplace.
Following on the heels of a $2 million investment in the company by the European Founders Fund, the product is part of LeadPoint’s continued expansion in both the UK and the rest of Europe. Over one million leads have been traded on the LeadPoint system in 2006 alone.
Nick Chapman, managing director of LeadPoint UK, said: “Secured loans are one of the UK’s fastest growing debt categories and our new trading platform offers LeadPoint customers the most efficient and profitable environment in which to buy and sell leads in this market. Since our launch in the UK last year, we have seen a significant increase in daily trading volume and plan to continue adding new categories with the goal of making LeadPoint the country’s top marketplace for online lead exchange across a broad range of financial services industries.”
LeadPoint claims the lead exchange platform is the first ever to provide buyers with the ability to set exact parameters for the leads they are looking to purchase—for instance by specifying loan amount, location of borrower and credit quality, among other variables—and bidding only on appropriate matches. This functionality eliminates the process of buying leads in bulk and then sifting through them for possible matches. LeadPoint also offers a much more stringent level of protection against fraudulent leads by actively verifying and monitoring all of the sellers on its system.
Marc Diana, CEO of LeadPoint, said: “We see the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe as extremely strong growth areas for LeadPoint and are pleased to introduce a product that brings our lead matching technology to the secured loans arena. Online lead generation is one of the major engines underpinning internet commerce as a whole and by being the first to apply market dynamics to the process we improve the experience for market participants while positioning LeadPoint for strong growth as the older, inefficient model of lead generation is increasingly phased out.”
