RICHARD QUEST, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Lending money has always been a community affair.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Your money is in Joe's house. That's right next to yours and the Kennedy house and 100 others.</s>QUEST: As the banks became more involved, everything changed. When economies crashed in 2008, bank lending dried up and opened the doors for others to step in. Today it's called peer to peer lending, a platform where people lend money to each other over the Internet.</s>SOUL HTITE, PRODUCER AND CEO, DIANRONG: You can get, actually, a better deal by looking at people around you, looking at your community.</s>QUEST: The benefits work both ways. Borrowers typically pay lower interest rates. Lenders earn higher returns.</s>PETER RENTON, FOUNDER, LEND ACADEMY: It's very simple. It's very fast. Really you can do it in your pajamas at 2:00 in the morning. From the investor perspective, it's for the first time ever people have been able to invest money in their fellow citizens.</s>QUEST: China is the home to the biggest rise in peer to peer lending where the company Dianrong says it's growing by an astonishing 20 percent each month. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow all come together as one. Peer to peer lending allows members of the community to lend money to each other.</s>RENTON: It's funny because it's sort of come full circle. Banks are now participating in peer to peer lending.</s>HTITE: I doubt that people born today are ever going to have a bank account the same way you and I have a bank account. I think we're going to see the banking world completely transformed.</s>WHITFIELD: All right, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm Fredricka Whitfield. The news continues after a short break with Poppy Harlow.
Investment Via Peer-to-Peer Lending Examined