We’d like to invite you to join us for a free 30-minute online Webinar that will show you to How to Put Your Cash to Work with Lending Club. We’ll provide an overview of how Lending Club eliminates the high cost and complexity of traditional banks and offers investors the opportunity for returns that average over 9% annually (see report). Notes offered by prospectus filed with the SEC.

Space is Limited so register now

Thursday, June 11, 2009
Noon PT/3:00pm ET

With 18 days to go until we reach the end of our 5% Cash Bonus program, we want to update everyone on our progress:

• Our growth has been fantastic! We have reached $6MM in issued loans, and have over $3MM of loans in funding today, so our loan volume is growing extremely well

• Our lender base is growing as well – the number of lenders has doubled in the last month alone

• Our next system release (due in the next few days) also offers a great new set of lender tools that makes lending and account management even easier and incorporates feedback from many in our lending community

With all of the growth in loans and loan requests, we want to reach out as widely as possible to current and now prospective lenders with our special offer: Lending Club will give a 5% cash bonus to all lenders who lend $5,000 or more between December 14, 2007 and February 3, 2008. This bonus can be used to lend or can be withdrawn to your linked checking account. There are no special sign-ups needed to participate in this program.

Click here to read the program details.

Better Lending. Together

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.

The average return on all loan portfolios created by Lending Club lenders since the opening of our public Beta on Facebook on May 24 has been steadily moving up. As you can see from our home page, the average portfolio yield is currently 12.10%. What is the reason for the steady increase?

We believe that this trend reflects good news for everyone in the Lending Club community. Our interest rates are driven by credit grade. Credit grade is driven by multiple factors including credit score and loan amount. Interest rates vary with the size of the requested loan, which is done to reflect the difference in risk between a small payment and a larger one (assuming an equal pre-loan Debt-to-Income ratio)

Lending Club's average loan size has steadily increased - from under $5,000 in June to about $6,000 now, which has moved many loans into slightly higher interest rate ranges based on the loan amount modifiers. This is good for borrowers because they are getting larger loan amounts approved (and fulfilled). Over 90% of our loan listings are funded and issued. For lenders, the yield on new portfolios is moving higher.

Long term, where is this going to go? It remains to be seen where the average return will end up. Our interest rates will move over time with the market and we are making adjustments to the rate modifiers as we get more data in. We expect that post-fee, post-default yields on portfolios will remain above 11%, making an investment in person-to-person loans on Lending Club a very compelling alternative to putting money into bonds and stocks.