Lending Club announced today that they have closed another funding round. Excerpt from the press release:
… closed a $12 million Series B round of funding. Morgenthaler Ventures led the round and is joined by existing investors, Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners. Rebecca Lynn, a Morgenthaler Principal, is joining Lending Club’s board of directors.
Lending Club also announced today that it has added Pamela Kramer as Chief Marketing Officer. Ms. Kramer is an established marketing veteran … . She was most recently Chief Marketing Officer of MarketTools, Inc and, before that, spent 9 years in leadership roles with E*TRADE Financial … .
As P2Plendingnews.com has researched Lending Club has invested 2.4 million US$ of its own money to fund loans since the relaunch in last October. The total volume of funded loans is approx. 10 million US$, that means that Lending Club funded about 24% of all loans itself.
The data is from weekly sales reports that Lending Club files with the SEC. The sales reports look like this and give details on each loan funded.
More details and numbers in the article (recommended reading) by P2Plendingnews.com.
While this may be contrary to the “pure” idea of peer to peer lending my take on this is:
I see it as a positive development. By using own money to fund loans Lending Club demonstrates their belief in the business model and shares the same risk it expects lenders to take. By the way: There are ongoing discussions at MYC4 about changes that could lead to MyC4 and MYC4 providers to share more risk in funded loans.
By co-funding loans Lending Club adds continuity. When supply of money by lenders is low, Lending Club co-funds more. That way the demand by borrowers can be served without interruptions.
However since due to SEC filings very detailed information on the funded loans is publicly available, the explanation of Rob Garcia that the download data was removed due to privacy concerns (see previous post), seems stale.
P2Plendingnews questions, if Lending Club can continue with co-funding for running out of funds. On the other hand, Lending Club earns interest from the funded loans and can sell the notes any time on the secondary market (that would explain why so many of the notes there are offered for sale immediately after the loan was funded).
One further and important aspect: Only residents of 25 states can participate as lenders on Lending Club directly. However on the Note Trading platform residents of all but the states Kansas, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon, Texas and Vermontand the District of Columbia can buy notes. That means by co-funding loans and selling part of their investments on the Note Trading Platform Lending Club enables a larger target audience to use their service.
Please share your opinion by commenting here or in the Lending Club forum. Thank you.
Recently I noticed two changes on p2p lender’s Lending Club website.
On the statistics page the link to download the loan data was removed. Before it was possible to download the complete loan data since inception of the service. Furthermore the predefined setting for the parameter “Loans issued from” is set on March 1,2008 now. That means, if you look on the page and do not change that parameter manually you see how loans performed that were issued between March 1, 2008 and today. Older loans issued between June 1, 2007 and Feb 29, 2008 are not included in the displayed results.
When I noticed that, I was reminded of what Prosper did with it’s statistics. Prosper segmented it’s loans (e.g. prosper select index) and cited only results for better performing segments in press releases. Furthermore the predefined values on Prosper’s statistic page, were set in a way that lowered the late payments and default ratios compared to an average over all Prosper loans.
But Lending Club had successfully positioned itself with transparency a core value in the past, so I asked Lending Club to comment on the reasons for the changes.
Rob Garcia, Director Product Strategy told P2P-Banking.com:
This is a temporary situation. We chose to take down the files due to privacy concerns raised by our customers. We are working to address these concerns in a way that continues to provide full transparency to platform data, while protecting the privacy of our customers….
On the setting of the parameter he stated:
The default setting for the statistics page is a year. So since we are now in March, the “From” date is defaulted to March 2008. This is to show the most relevant annualized indicators for the last year. Users can then change the “From” and “To” dates to explore the indicators for a specific time frame they may be interested in, including from inception (June 1, 2007). We did this based on numerous email inquiries from lenders asking for annual default rates instead of a general default rate since inception (so that they can compare annual defaults to annual interest rates to get actual net returns). We’re looking at tools to make that calculation easier…
Yesterday Lazy Man wrote about his observations on how Lending Club reports risk. The posted screenshots show that interpretation of the risk figures is not obvious under certain circumstances.
P2P lending is spreading internationally. While the biggest loan volumes are generated in the US market, many p2p lending websites have been established in other international markets.
P2P-Banking.com has created the following overview table listing services that are in operation and ranked them by loan volume. The loan volumes are not directly comparable for they are cumulative since launch of each service and represent different time spans.
In total approx. 740 million US$ have been funded through peer to peer lending/social lending services so far worldwide.
This image may be reprinted on other internet sites, provided it is not altered or resized and the following text (including the direct link to this article) is given as source directly below the image: Source: P2P-Banking.com
It has been said before – there might have been no better time to establish p2p lending. With the established system shaken and many consumers not getting loans as easily as before the market environment is good for peer-to-peer lending.
P2P lending gets good media attention. The Uncrunch.org initiative (in which Lending Club takes part) in the Change.org vote for new ideas finished in the Top 15.
On the demand site all p2p lending companies benefit from the crisis. On the supply site, in my opinion the effect is mostly positive too, but some lenders are hesitant to invest their money in a new, innovative model and rather seek a save haven for it.
P2P lending sites that have demonstrated low default rates over a longer time and therefore low risk fared best – especially at Zopa UK supply rose strongly lately.
The SEC cease and desist order against Prosper offered the legal arguments on a plate, now the first class action lawsuit filed against Prosper Marketplace Inc. uses the SEC filing as exhibit A to state it’s case. Regarding numbers and affected lenders the lawsuit by The Rosen Law Firm, New York, states
“…As of October, 2008 approx. $21.7 million of loan notes purchased by Class Action members have become worthless because the borrowers did not pay the loans to Prosper. Additional loan notes will become worthless as more loans are charged off as uncollectible. … there are tens of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of, loan note purchasers that are class action members…”
Prosper is required to file a written response within 30 days. The first court date is set for May 1st, 2009.
On the same issue – selling unregistered securities – but in an otherwise unrelated case Prosper agreed to pay a 1 million US$ fine in a settlement to the states to avoid individual states suing against Prosper. More information on that in the press release of the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA). This is somewhat surprising to me as Prosper did obtain licenses in over 25 states and conducted lending under those, before it switched to the model using the WebBank. (see ‘Prosper riding the state-by-state roller coaster‘ and ‘Prosper goes national with 36 percent max interest rate‘). The same states that granted the licenses now wanting to sue Prosper?
Last week Zopa’s CEO Giles Andrews commented that regulation issue were the reason why Zopa did not use it’s UK model when it entered the US market.
While Lending Club has completed SEC registration and therefore is in compliance with the rules of the SEC, it might still face some risks. An article of the Oregonian on the NASAA settlement states:
“Oregon regulators also are investigating 40billion.com, owned by Atlanta-based 3 Guys in a Garage, and is currently reviewing a registration request by Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Lending Club, Anselm said.”
