Posted by Rob Garcia :: September 13, 2007 @ 6:14 pm

This is it. The great moment we have been working towards: expanding Lending Club beyond Facebook and making it available to anyone out there looking for better rates. We continue to enhance and support our Lending Club application in Facebook, but now, users don't have to be in Facebook to use our site.

As part of our public launch, we are unveiling new features that will benefit the whole p2p lending community, whether you are a Facebook user or not.

Here are some of the features we are proud to present:

Discover your connections: Lenders can now see how borrowers are connected to them, on an anonymous basis. Do they share a workplace, alma mater, association, hometown, or location? If so, LendingMatch™ accounts for connectedness among members to create diversified portfolios with higher levels of connections.

Invite your contacts, add more connections: We have enhanced our referral program to allow users to upload contacts from their Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL Webmail accounts. The more people you add, the more money you make ($5 per contact who signs up), and the better our Lending Club community becomes.

Better Search: Lenders have more ways to find the loans that will really interest them: type a user screen name, a college, workplace, city, hometown, association or any other keyword of interest to you that may be contained within loan descriptions.

Borrower's Account: Borrowers will now see additional information about their loan listings. Once the loan has been issued, borrowers can track their payment history and other relevant information.

Take Partial Funding and Relist: Did you not get all the funds you asked for? Not to worry. Borrowers can now take any partial funding received upon the expiration of the loan request. Would you rather try again instead of accepting the partial amount? Borrowers can also relist their loans within 45 days of their original loan application, and they can update the loan title and description to make the loan more appealing to prospective lenders.

You will also notice our improved home page and navigation. Take a look at new data we have on our communities’ performance, top lenders, rate comparisons, and more. You can now see where our lenders and borrowers are on the map.

Continue sending your comments, questions and recommendations. We love to hear them.