Posted by Patrick Gannon :: January 7, 2008 @ 4:51 am

We are focused on making our person-to-person lending site as simple and reliable as possible. As Barron's wrote this weekend, Lending Club and other P2P lending sites strive to be "highly automated, remarkably transparent, and employ Web 2.0-era ways of matching borrowers to lenders." To that end, we are releasing a series of improved and clarified pages starting with our statistics and lender ranking pages.

The intent of these pages was to provide a measure of current performance, similar to what you get on an online trading Website like Etrade or Schwab. Feedback from several of our lenders indicate that the ROI section was in some cases interpreted as a projection of future performance. With the amount of data we have gathered other the last 6 months, we cannot offer projections of future performance in a meaningful and reliable way. Faced with the risk that some current and potential lenders would use the ROI section as projections, we took that entire section down and will keep it that way until we have sufficient data to make reliable projections of future ROI. We have put up a new statistics page and lender rankings page to clarify the statistics and make our help page more helpful. This is an intermediary step that fixes a couple of statistical issues and clarifies the help file content.

We will release another version of the statistics page in the next few weeks that shows more details, including late loans as percentage of loans issued for more than 45 days and a breakdown of late loans by age. Thank you to all for your continued input and suggestions. We look forward to hearing from you on these improvements.