It's called hype for a reason

Hype? I’m not sure.

Firstly let me declare an interest – I am cofounder and CEO of Zopa. We were the very first online peer-to-peer lender anywhere in the world and just celebrated our fifth birthday.  We lent more money last year than over the previous 4 years combined.  Whilst £70 million will sound tiny to most banks, an escalating growth rate of now well over 100% year on year will not.  

I think the time it has taken for us to approach scale and profitability is a function of the time it takes to build trust in a new consumer finance offering, especially for a brand new start up like Zopa. Anyway, there is no question the time is right, as Matthew Parris eloquently sets out here in the Spectator http://www.spectator.co.uk/politics/all/5831713/its-time-we-bank-customers-started-talking-to-each-other-in-the-queue.thtml

Given the way that applications are delivered on facebook, i think that the security concerns of users would make facebook an inappropriate choice of platform. At least ZOPA was designed from the ground up for its purpose. Facebook has a track record of being lax when dealing with users privacy, hence i think this very fact would act as a barrier for most users to use facebook for any sort of currency operations.