For the coming Lending Club IPO a recent SEC filing reveals details on the valuation of the company.
LendingClub Corporation is offering 50,000,000 shares of its common stock and the selling stockholders are offering 7,700,000 shares of common stock. We will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders. This is our initial public offering and no public market currently exists for our shares of common stock. We anticipate that the initial public offering price will be between $10.00 and $12.00 per share.
After the IPO there will be 361,111,491 shares of common stock outstanding at Lending Club so at 12 US$ per share this will result in a 4.33 US$ billion valuation. Read more details on Lend Academy.
This is a guest post by Tomoyuki Sugiyama, Representative Director of Crowdcredit, Inc (full bio at the end of the article).
Advent of P2P lending in Japan
maneo, Inc. and Exchange Corporation KK were the first P2P lending platform operators in Japan. In 2007, maneo, Inc. was established and it started the registration processes with Japanese authorities which were necessary to run the platform. And it launched the platforms – maneo – in 2008. Exchange Corporation launched its P2P lending platform AQUSH in 2009. Also SBI group established a subsidiary to run P2P lending platform – SBI Social Lending Co., Ltd. – in 2008 and launched the platform in 2011.
maneo at first focused on consumer loans, but soon changed its focus to SMEs loans. AQUSH focused on consumer loans and widened its line-ups to real-estate collateralized loans, overseas consumer loans (investments are made in the loans originated by LendingClub) and loans of which borrowers are solar energy power plant operators in early 2013. SBI Social Lending focuses on securities collateralized consumer loans.
From regulatory perspective, any legal entity (person or company) which lends money in Japan must make registration under Money Lending Business Act, which prevents the P2P lending platform operators to offer a platform which personal investors lend money directly to the borrowers. Hence in Japan, personal investors effectively lend their money to the borrowers through investing in the P2P lending platforms’ businesses which they lend money to the borrowers as the operators of investment funds (Anonymous Partnership Agreements under Japanese commercial law).
Recent trend in Japan
Compared to the growth of P2P lending markets in the UK or in USA, Japanese P2P lending market grew moderately – currently the amount of outstanding loans managed by the largest P2P lending platform, maneo, is estimated to be around 60 million dollars. This is assumed due to over-banking in Japan – in Japan, national average loan to deposit ratio of traditional banks is below 70% and the banks lend quite aggressively, which is quite different from the situation in the UK or in USA where the banks are lending less and less in de-leverage process of their balance sheet in post Lehman crisis period. Borrowers in Japan can much more easily access to traditional financial system compared to the borrowers in the UK or in USA and national average lending interest rate of the banks in Japan is currently 0.887%.
As a result, no operator entered into P2P lending market in Japan after SBI Social Lending and there were only three P2P lending platforms in Japan until 2013.
In late 2012, Crowd Securities Japan Co. Ltd. (previously Midori Securities) announced to launch the fourth P2P lending platform in Japan – Crowd Bank – in 2013 and they launched it in late December in 2013. Crowd Bank offers SMEs loans, real-estate collateralized loans and also overseas microfinance loans which the platform lends to MFIs in Asian region.
Also in early 2013, Crowdcredit, Inc. announced to launch the fifth P2P lending platform in Japan and it was launched in June 2014. Crowdcredit became the first P2P lending platform in Japan which focuses only on cross-border P2P lending. Crowdcredit, as the operator of the platform, has invested in credit market in Peru in Latin America as a start. Continue reading →
P2P Lending Service Lending Club Filed a preliminary prospectus today with the SEC to prepare the IPO. Lending Club aims to raise 500 million US$ in the public offering. The document does not set a share price or a company valuation, which will happen later on in the process. The underwriters are Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Stifel, BMO, Allen & Co., William Blair, and Wells Fargo. In the first half oof 2014 Lending Club had a revenue of 87.3 million US$ and a net loss of 16.5 million US$. S. The company had 2.33 billion US$ in p2p loans on its balance sheet as of June 30.
This is a huge boost for p2p lending and will raise lots of awareness in the US and internationally for the innovative industry.
Rapid growth of Lending Club’s loan volume since launch in 2007
A long time downside of p2p lending was that each company used its own definition for defaults making it hard to impossible for all but experts to compare figures for different p2p lending companies. The Peer-to-Peer Finance Association (P2PFA), a trade organisation of British p2p lending companies, now addressed this issue with a new standard: ‘In future, all P2PFA members will calculate defaults on their loans in a standard way, helping consumers compare between platforms and to strengthen standards of industry disclosure. The new default rate calculation is currently being implemented and will be published on each individual P2PFA member’s website.’
P2PFA definitions of Non-Performing Loans and Defaults:
Definition of Non-Performing Loan: A loan should be considered to be a ’Non-Performing Loan’, ‘Impaired’ or in ‘Arrears’, where the relevant borrower of the loan is: (a) more than 45 days overdue in an interest payment; or (b) more than 45 days overdue with a principal repayment; or (c) legal action for enforcement of the loan has commenced; or (d) the loan is being or has been renegotiated with a borrower, or (e) the loan has not otherwise been in full compliance. The amount of arrears is the amount overdue for payment in a) and b) above. Continue reading →
Zopa has announced changes to the sequence in which investor funds are matched in lending.
Over the next few weeks we will be making a number of changes we believe that will improve the overall lending experience.
Phase 1 – Maximum exposure change
Starting this week, we will be adjusting the maximum exposure for lenders. This will mean that the maximum you lend to any individual borrower will rise from 0.5% to 2% of your total funds. This means that you will lend in £10 chunks when lending up to £1000, £20 chunks when lending above £1000, £40 chunks above £2000 etc. This change will enable us to allocate more of a lender’s money to each loan and allow funds to be lent out more quickly. From a risk point of view, 2% provides a good level of initial diversification and over the course of time it will steadily increase so that lenders will have hundreds or even thousands of individual loans.
Phase 2 – First in first out lending (FIFO)
The second update which will also take place in the coming weeks will see us prioritise repayment money to allow existing funds to be matched more efficiently. We are calling this “First In First Out†(FIFO) and will separate out new funds from repayment funds, with repayments being matched first. New funds, or manual top ups are then placed in a FIFO queue and then dropped into the matching engine in a controlled way. This prevents spikes in new funding from slowing down lending of repayment money and allows us to give an accurate prediction of when new funds will be matched. It also allows us to lend as much repayment money on offer before allocating new funds for loans, therefore working your existing money harder.
Phase 3 – End of day matching
In the following weeks we will begin matching loans in one process at the end of each day. By allowing loans to be accumulated over the course of the day and including rapid returns, we can optimise the matching process to make it even more efficient. This will mean that all our lenders will receive a more consistent blended rate, regardless of lending size in any given day.
At Zopa our goal is to provide the best rates to our lenders and borrowers and ensure that we are as efficient as we can be in our lending. We believe that lenders will see an immediate effect on their money being matched. Meaning increased efficiency and more consistent rates from the changes detailed above.
A discussion around this change can be found in this thread.
Zopa is also changing the layout of the site. One change is that the visibility of the link to the Zopa community features, especially the discussion forum is reduced. Continue reading →
