Peer-to-peer lender SocietyOne has moved out of "soft launch" mode with an aggressive offer of an unsecured personal loan at 9.8 per cent.SocietyOne chief executive Matt Symons said the company had spent the past 18 months making sure its business model worked and now it was ready to attract borrowers."We are ready to put our head up," Symons said.SocietyOne has a different structure to classic peer-to-peer models. It does not offer a one-to-one match between lenders and borrowers.Instead, it divides each loan into fractions and encourages investors to build a portfolio by investing in a range of loans. Symons said each loan could have as many as 100 investors contributing funds.The portfolio approach is designed to give investors diversification and reduce their risk. SocietyOne also puts caps on investors' exposure to borrowers in different credit rating categories. Some commentators have argued that, on account of this structure, SocietyOne is not a true peer-to-peer lender.Symons disagrees: "It is peer-to-peer in the sense that borrowers present their applications and investors put their money into that loan. It is a group of individuals lending to another group of individuals."We do not fund anything on our balance sheet or do any origination ourselves."The 9.8 per cent loan offer is for A-rated credits. SocietyOne uses Veda credit scores to place loan applicants in one of four bands and gains access to credit files and bank statements to verify the applicant's suitability.For D-rated borrowers the rate is between 14 per cent and 15.5 per cent.Symons would not say how applicants broke down, in terms of credit classes, nor would he say how much business the company has done to date.At this stage the company offers just one product - a three year unsecured personal loan for amounts between $5000 and $30,000.Symons said: "We have a good proposition. We offer risk-based pricing on personal loans, which we think is fairer to borrowers."And we have an online application that is very quick and offers a lot of convenience."