ZOPA stands for Zone Of Possible Agreement, a term identifying the bounds within which agreement can be reached between two negotiating parties and was the perfect name the company because in the early years, ZOPA allowed its investors to see the whole ZOPA market based credit scores and assign their money and set their own interest rates. If they set their interest rate too low they would get a very low rate of return, if they set it too high no lenders would borrow their money, until some kind of equilibrium was reached. In 2010 (approx) ZOPA removed this feature and replaced it with a "black box" where investors could only chose between two markets: ZOPA Core and ZOPA Plus. Funding Circle did much the same thing a few years later.


In 2011 the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association was established, with Zopa as a founding member. It was one of the first P2P lenders in the UK. Zopa was started in 2004 by James Alexander, Giles Andrews, Tim Parlett, Richard Duvall, David Nicholson. Zopa has a yearly get-together in The Cotton Centre for its investors so they can meet and talk about peer-to-peer technology. Normal Return on Investment varies between 3.3% - 5.5% but is subject to market conditions.