Reports earlier this week that the new Westpac-backed venture capital fund Reinventure Group had taken a million stake in peer-to-peer lender SocietyOne missed the point. Westpac was not buying into a classic P2P business, but into a smaller consumer finance outfit lending to good credit risks in steady employment and funded by wholesale investors.Still, the SocietyOne business model represents a step forward for alternative lenders, unlike Australia's first mover in peer-to-peer lending, iGrin.  This firm was said to be coming out of hibernation in mid-2013, a year after West Australian investors Tim Dean and Michael Stratman bought iGrin from its founder, Phil Hopper.At the time iGrin emailed previous investors and borrowers to advise them it was aiming to raise A$5.2 million in loanable funds and would "relaunch" from September 2013.Yesterday, one of the iGrin owners confirmed plans were still afoot, but declined to give details.It might get tougher, as a lack of regulations means Australia trails other English-speaking developed countries on the P2P lending front. For instance, this week the UK's Financial Conduct Authority set out new rules designed to boost protection for people lending and investing through P2P and other crowdfunding platforms, which reportedly turn over hundreds of millions of dollars in the UK and the US.And, in New Zealand, new regulations for crowd funding and peer-to-peer lending come into force on April 1 as part of that government's financial market overhaul. Under the NZ rules, there will be no investor caps for equity crowd-funding, other than a previously announced NZ$2 million cap on what individual companies can raise through the process each year.