Posted by Lending Club :: October 31, 2007 @ 2:45 pm

People-to-People Lending Service Now Available to Alumni of Georgia Tech, Kansas State and University of Michigan

SUNNYVALE, CA – October 31, 2007 - Since the early 1900s, homecoming has marked the return of millions of alumni looking to reconnect and give back to their alma maters across the country. Lending Club, the rapidly growing people-to-people (P2P) lending service, today announced the availability of its affinity-based lending service through the websites of top university alumni associations to offer a new way to lend and borrow money among fellow alumni. Lending Club is the first in the P2P lending industry to provide co-branded lending applications to online communities, including the alumni associations at Georgia Tech, Kansas State and University of Michigan.

"Whether it's helping fellow alumni pay off student loans or launch new enterprises, we offer a rewarding new way for alumni to invest directly in each other," said Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club. "Lending Club's unique, affinity-based service enables people to bypass the banks to get better rates by borrowing and lending directly within communities they trust."

Lending Club launched at the end of May exclusively as a Facebook application. Since then, the Lending Club community has rapidly grown beyond Facebook to more than 22,000 users who have loaned and borrowed more than $2 million within the community. By partnering with alumni associations across the country, Lending Club further expands its affinity-based lending service across top alumni communities. Lending Club will enable these alumni associations to connect with social networks like Facebook, combining alumni benefits offered by the associations while leveraging the social interaction and viral nature of Facebook and other online communities.

"Our mission is to cultivate loyalty, tradition and lifelong relationships. Lending Club helps leverage these relationships and build new ones by giving our members the opportunity to invest in fellow Wolverines," said Jerry Sigler, senior vice president and chief financial officer of the University of Michigan Alumni Association.

To help people identify lending and borrowing opportunities, Lending Club uses its proprietary affinity-matching technology, LendingMatch™, that looks at factors such as where a person went to school, where they grew up or what they do for a living. LendingMatch™ instantly recommends diversified portfolios based on these affinities and ensures the creditworthiness of each borrower.

Lending Club is available to individual borrowers with credit scores at or above 640. Using Lending Club, borrowers can apply for personal loans of $500 to $25,000 to be funded by one or many individual lenders. To date lenders have funded 90 percent of all approved loan requests. Lending Club handles user authentication, bank account verification, credit checking, credit reporting, funds transfers and collections.