Mr. Peter O'Mahony:

I think the polite term for the type of people we attract who may have been with the banks is that they are people who have been "disenfranchised" by the banks. We have a borrower who has a retail outlet on Liffey Street. He opened in 2010, when the snows came, and for two weeks did not have one customer through the door. He went to the bank and said he needed to pay wages on a Friday and asked to borrow €1,500 to pay his staff. Eleven weeks later, he was refused a loan. He made the decision there and then that he would never use mainstream banking again. He would save money before buying anything and handed back his credit card machine. All he uses his bank account for is to pay suppliers who insist on being paid by transfer or cheque. Before we met this man, he had been saving up €5,000 over six months and then buying a new fridge and then saving for another six months and buying a new counter. When he met us, that allowed him to borrow €30,000 in one go to open a second retail outlet and employ 11 people. He did not have to save for six or nine months. Not everybody is like him, but we have other borrowers who have borrowed €25,000 from us. They were told by the banks that they would be given €25,000 for their business and that the banks wanted to support them, but they needed to put €25,000 in a deposit account as security against the loan. Obviously, if the business person had the €25,000 in the first place, he or she would not have needed to borrow.

We are not the lender of last resort, nor are we just meeting people who have been turned down. We are meeting people who want to get things done quickly. They might have a van that is in trouble and needs to be replaced and they cannot wait eight weeks or survive without making deliveries for that length of time. They want to move quickly. It is a kind of social business. Mr. Vander Elst's and Ms Redden's business is in the green energy area - electric bikes. The people who lent to them would love that business because it is a socially conscious business that is better for the environment and so on.

A question was asked about who was lending or the type of people who were lending. We have no millionaires. The average loan bid is €146, a tiny payment. They are people like the rest of us, ordinary guys on the street. If we profile the average person lending on the site, it is a man between 40 and 55 years of age. The average person has deposited just under €2,000 for lending - small money. Everything we do on the site is about diversifying the risk. If somebody puts €1,000 on the website, everything on it would tell him to put €50, the minimum bid, into 20 businesses, rather than put €500 into two. Some of our businesses will fail, without question. We guarantee that will happen. What we do not want is for somebody to put half of his or her funds into one business. Ideally, he should put €50 into 20 businesses and if one of the businesses fails, he or she will still have 19 performing loans.

The profile of the people lending on the site has not changed since day one. It is a great mix of people, which is what we want. Therefore, we have a business like Greenaer which deals with what consumers want, with customers who can make offers on its bikes or see a trade exhibition and so on. Businesses like Mr. McMonagle's are similar. He is supplying vets up and down the country. One of his lenders might have a sister or a brother-in-law who is a vet and this might open a door for him. There are always such opportunities, which is why we called it LinkedFinance to try to link borrowers and lenders.

With regard to start-ups, it is not until we become more established that we can deal with them because it is very hard for us to make an informed decision on whether a start-up business will succeed.

The only way we will do it in the future, probably, is by matching funding or co-funding with people who can put a bit more time and effort into mentoring or helping the business get started.

Deputy Kyne's fifth question was on the limits. There is no limit to how much somebody can lend through the site. We restrict it so that people can only bid up to a maximum of €2,000 on any project. That is for two reasons: first, we do not want someone to make a mistake and put their whole fund into one particular loan; and second, we do not want somebody to control a loan. For example, with Greenaer, the electrical bike company, we would not want a competitor in Cork totally funding the loan and maybe putting a bit of pressure on the owner to buy his bikes, only supply his saddles or whatever. Therefore, €2,000 is the maximum and, ideally, from the business's point of view, we would like 100 or 200 lenders to participate in each loan.