Kiva Announces Auto Lending!

Have you ever wanted to lend to a Kenyan with an agricultural business, but every time you checked Kiva you seemed to have just missed the new loans posted from Kenya?

Have you ever left your repaid Kiva credit unused in your account for months at a time because you couldn’t find the loan you wanted?

One of your most requested features has been a way to lend automatically to specific types of loans, without having to search Kiva. Today, we’re very proud to announce the upcoming launch of Kiva’s newest feature: Auto Lending, which has been designed to let you:

• Automatically make the loans you want
• Maximize your impact by making sure your Kiva credit is always loaned

We've often heard Kiva Lenders say, "I really enjoy lending, but I never remember to re-lend my money when my loans are paid back." If that sounds like you, then Auto Lending will help you make sure that your repaid Kiva Credit is never sitting idle in your account when it could be helping an entrepreneur with her business.

So, How Does Auto Lending Work?

We’ve designed Auto Lending to be extremely simple to use!

All you have to do is:

1. Turn it on
2. Select the types of loans you want to make
3. Add the funds you want loaned

Kiva takes care of the rest:

• We’ll automatically find loans matching your criteria and make those loans on your behalf.
• You’ll get an email after each Auto Loan with information about the businesses you’re lending to.

You Control Your Auto Lending

The Kiva Auto Lending service allows you to choose the types of loans you’d like to make, and you can tell us how long we should wait before finding you matches.

You can choose your loans based on:

• Country
• Business Sector
• Keyword
• Risk Rating
• Gender

You can set the Auto Lending timer to make loans

• Whenever you have unused Kiva Credit in your account, or
• When you haven’t logged into Kiva for a period of time

This feature lets you have the flexibility to manually choose your loans when you have time to check Kiva, but also automatically choose loans when you don’t.

And, you can turn Auto Lending on or off at any time. It’s a great way to keep up with your lending even when you’re away on vacation or having a busy week at work.

Can all of the loans on Kiva be funded by Auto Loans?

No. Kiva prefers loans to be made by real people, so we've restricted Auto Lending to a maximum of 50% of any loan. The other 50% of any loan must be funded by real people. (Of course loans can be more than 50% funded by real people, just not less than 50%.)

When can I start using the Auto Lending?

We’re in the final stages of testing right now and we expect that you'll be able to use Auto Lending in just a few weeks. Please check back here in a few weeks for the launch announcement.