While it is certainly too early to read much into the numbers, we are now a few weeks into the Facebook launch and it is certainly looking like things are now functioning pretty well!

We announced that our first loan had closed this past Thursday, with a happy Facebook user receiving a $3,000 loan at a 9.33%. In the following 5 business days, we closed another 12 loans with an aggregate value of $39,650. The average interest rate on these loans was 9.70%.

About 6,700 Facebook users have installed the Lending Club application. If you are on Facebook, chances are you’re already seeing us popping up here and there. We have approved and verified 223 lenders and processed more than 200 loan applications over the last few weeks.

Please continue to send us comments, feedback and ideas in the Facebook forums or directly at feedback@lendingclub.com. We have tons of ideas here at Lending Club to make our site more usable and more enjoyable. Overall we want to make sure our focus is working on the right features for our community members.

Thank you all for your support!

Renaud from Lending Club

We introduced the fantastic report – Social Personal Finance – back on this blog post. As many of you have found out, this report is quite in depth. We see a lot of you visiting the site, and for those that have read it cover to cover, we know this may be old news.

Starting from just a few hundred thousand today, we expect two million U.S. households will be using social personal finance sites by the end of next year.

The above is a forecast or prediction by Jim Bruene. We agree that the main catalyst behind this forecast is social networking. Nine years ago no individual could have forecasted the growth of social networking.

We are riding the tidal wave branded as Facebook Platform. It is bigger than anyone expected it to be. Lending Club was the first collaborative financial service to launch on a social network on May 24. We are taking this opportunity to help promote financial responsibility among our members.

Our constant reference back to our favorite study is done to help pass on information that is not always common knowledge. We are getting tremendous feedback and good will from the Facebook community, as well as increasing support and engagement. We will be releasing later this morning our latest numbers, two and a half week after the launch. They are quite surprising.

You have a credit card, and you just charged $1000. This is very easy to do and yet extremely tough to pay off. While the news bulletin about credit cards doubling their minimum payment rate is old news, the fact remains the same. If you were to only pay the minimum payment, on time with no late fees or additional charges, it could take 22 years to pay off that $1000!

For the estimated 40% of cardholders who carry a balance from month to month, the low minimums free up cash. But paying off a big charge little by ever-so-little also means that a $1,000 debt can turn into a 22-year commitment -- and that you'll accumulate thousands more in interest in the meantime.

Information such as the one above makes us wonder if there is an improved way to pay off your credit card debt. For people with good credit, we have a great answer. The answer is a 3 year term loan with convenient electronic payments and a rate that doesn’t go up.

According to Nellie Mae, 83% of undergraduate students attending four-year institutions have at least one credit card with an average balance of $2,169. 23% of students have a balance above $3,000, and 7% of them have a balance above $7,000!

The study, published in May 2005, found that only twenty-one percent of undergraduates with credit cards reported that they pay off all cards each month. This means that 79% of them are paying the credit card interest rates which are around 18.9% – a typical college credit card rate.

Students, recent graduates and alumni can work together on Lending Club to provide relief for all of this high interest rate debt. For people with good credit, Lending Club offers a low-cost way to refinance high interest rate debt and help you pay it off with a term loan.

For those whose credit is not as good, we recommend you review your options with a trusted third party like Nellie Mae.

Nellie Mae put it nicely in their study:

Students particularly need to understand that there are other, less-costly financing options for purchasing big-ticket items, especially for costs associated with college attendance.

We are pleased that we have the TRUSTe seal of approval, certifying that our privacy and security practices meet their high standards of excellence. We are committed to providing a safe place for you to conduct business as borrowers and lenders. So committed, in fact, that we have submitted our privacy and security practices to rigorous scrutiny by TRUSTe, the Internet's leading protectors of consumer privacy.

Chief among our privacy practices is the fact that while your identity is verified as a borrower or lender, all loan listings are anonymous. Our privacy policy includes a detailed accounting of all personal information we collect, how the information is used, and with whom it may be shared. Some information we collect is shown to other members, while other information is kept private. We always tell you which is which, and there are no guessing games.

This policy also covers our security practices, including the fact that your sensitive financial data is securely stored in an off-site facility. We encourage you to read our privacy policy and contact us with any questions at privacy@lendingclub.com.