Growth and other Recent News in P2P Lending

September 2, 2011 wiseclerk

Zopa has announced that it reached the milestone of 150 million GBP in loans facilitated. Zopa says the new loan volume per month accounts for between 1% and 2% of new personal loan volume made in the UK.

P2P lending service Lending Club announced yesterday that it has been selected as a World Economic Forum 2012 Technology Pioneer. Lending Club was selected from amongst hundreds of applicants from around the world that hold the promise of significantly impacting the way business and society operate.

Both Lending Club and Prosper did continue their growth of monthly loan volume origination in August (Sociallending.net has charts and company comments).

Lending Club Gets $25M More Funding

August 3, 2011August 3, 2011 wiseclerk

P2P Lending service Lending Club has raised another 25 million US$ funding.

Union Square Ventures led the Series D round and joins Lending Club as a Board Observer. All existing venture investors participated in the funding round.

â€œWe are thrilled to welcome Union Square Ventures as an equity partner,â€ said Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche. â€œWhile we did not need additional funding, we could not pass up the opportunity to work closely with the USV team and their network of companies. USV will be instrumental in continuing to accelerate Lending Clubâ€™s growth and in leveraging our technology platform and network effect to simultaneously reduce the cost of credit to borrowers and enhance investorsâ€™ returns.â€

The new funding brings Lendingclub’s total funding to 77.7 million US$.

(source: press release)

A Guide to US Regulation on P2P Lending

July 7, 2011July 7, 2011 wiseclerk

Ever wondered how p2p lending is regulated in the US in detail? The new GAO report ‘Person-To-Person Lending: New Regulatory Challenges Could Emerge as the Industry Grows‘ has all the details and covers the situation of Prosper, Lending Club and Kiva. It also reviews possible regulatory changes.

Lending Club Nearing Break Even

June 21, 2011June 21, 2011 wiseclerk

Peter in an article over at SocialLendingNet has collected some interesting statements showing that Lending Club is close to be able reaching break even on cash flow terms.

Renauld Laplanche told him, that Lending ClubÂ has topped 1 million US$ monthly revenue and could thereby cover it’s operating expenses, if investments in the future (technology, marketing) are disregarded.

Lending Club is the second major p2p lending service after Zopa to approach break even.

Lending Club is still a long way from making profit as it has a long way to go to redeem the money invested in the platform over the past years. But the growing volume and the ability to cover expenses a very good signs that p2p lending services can scale to profitability.

390,000 US$ P2P Loan Funded via Rebirth Financial

May 31, 2011May 31, 2011 wiseclerk 2 Comments

Rebirth Financial announced that it facilitated a 390,000 US$ loan via it’s social lending platform to NOLA Brewing Company. You can read more about NOLA Brewing company here.

The press release says: “In the case of NOLA Brewing, Rebirth Financial matched the loan to ASI Federal Credit Union in less than one week. ‘Rebirthâ€™s process was quick, easy, and helped us raise the necessary funding to can our beer,’ said Dylan Lintern, Vice President of NOLA Brewing Company.“.

If I read this right and the loan was funded by just one institutional lender you can hardly file this under Rebirth Financial’s claim “Rebirth Financial Inc. debuted Americaâ€™s first person-to-business lending platform … in February. It allows people to lend small sums of money to small businesses in their community.“. I wrote to the founder Chonchol Gupta who replied: “This loan started as a p2p loan but was fully funded by the credit union, who would not have seen the loan or perhaps given thought to it, if it was not for the groundswell of community interest. Banks see it as great PR to fund loans important to the community.“