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We are pleased to roll out a few new features that will make our lenders' lives easier:

Monthly Statements

P2P lenders at Lending Club can now see a clear snapshot of their account each month. An account summary shows monthly interest earnings and variation in account value, as well as the asset allocation by loan grade. Detailed cash flow, loan payment and loan performance information is also provided as part of the statements. Monthly statements have been generated retroactively for the full fiscal year.

Account Activity

A new account activity page provides essentially the same information as the monthly statements, for any selected period of time. Lenders can select a beginning date and an end date and retrieve all account activity during that period. Account Activity also provides a full ledger of all transactions, including each and every payment made under each fraction of loan.

Retrieving and Sorting Loans

Lenders can now retrieve their loans by status, grade, portfolio and date, and re-order any subset of their loans based on amount, principal outstanding and payment dates.

Managing Loan Portfolios

Lenders can now create their own "view" of their account by grouping their loans into portfolios based on their own criteria: maturity, risk grade, performance, interest rate, etc. The previous notion of "portfolio" (i.e., a group of loans bought at the same exact time) has now been renamed "order". An order history is also made available to the lenders.

Please send us comments or feedback, or tell us which features we should be working on next. Send your thoughts our way at feedback@lendingclub.com.

Over the weekend, we added several improvements to our site. Our team worked hard to get the new features out, and we’ve enjoyed hearing from many of you who noticed them.

We were particularly pleased that our blogger friends at Personal Loan Portfolio, Lazy Man and Money, RateLadder, and My Microfinance covered our new release, in some cases practically in real time!

So, what's in this release?

• Credit-criteria based search: Our search engine has been seriously upgraded. In addition to searching loans by keyword, % funded and loan grade, lenders can also search by number of delinquencies in the last 2 years (0, 1-3, 4+), DTI (<10%, 10-20%, >20%), and FICO range (714+, 640-659, etc.). More advanced search features are still to come, but these new capabilities will help lenders better zero in on loans that match their specific criteria.

• Search results navigation: After you have identified the loans you are interested in, you can review each one in turn before adding it to your portfolio. Open the first loan and then use the new navigation to scroll through the rest without having to go back to your search results using the controls.

• My Account revamp: Lenders will now be able to have a clearer picture of their account performance with these new features:

o Overall Loans Status: Track your overall performance easier by viewing your loans grouped by status.

o Indicators: Monitor your overall weighted average rate, expected monthly payments, and received payments (broken down by principal, interest and adjustments).

o Account Total: View and understand your total holdings in an easier format. Three sections (Cash + In Funding Loans + Remaining Principal) roll up to your total account value. A Cash detail reconciles money that flows in and out of your account by breaking out such transactions as added/withdrawn funds, earned interest, bonuses, service fees, etc. A Remaining Principal detail shows how much money you’ve invested vs. how much of it has been paid back.

• New All Loans view: As it turns out, many users prefer to view their funded loans without having to open up each portfolio. We now offer you an All Loans View and a Portfolios View. Enjoy!

• Rejected Loans data: Because we strive to make Lending Club as transparent as possible, we now are showing loans that were rejected for credit reasons in addition to loans that have been funded. We are committed to a rigid credit policy both to protect the lender community and to reward the highest quality borrowers. Not only do we make sure that our borrowers have FICO scores of 640+ while keeping a pre-loan DTI lower than 30%, but now we also ensure that borrowers have no current delinquencies at the time their loans are submitted.

• LendingMatch improvements: Our secret sauce recipe gets some tasty tweaks every now and then. This time, LendingMatch has been modified to let you spread your money over a larger number of loans if you wish to do so.

• Wire funds to your account: And finally, we are pleased to offer lenders something they’ve been clamoring for: the ability to wire funds into their Lending Club accounts so that they can start lending faster without the need to verify their bank account.

Tell us what you think, and continue sharing your views on what else we can be doing to improve your experience on Lending Club. We are listening!

Better Site. Together.

What a busy couple of months it’s been! Everyone at Lending Club is thrilled to have grown our community so fast since our public launch slightly over two months ago.

I always mention how important your feedback and comments are to us, but the last couple of months have been particularly helpful to Lending Club and your fellow members. We have met several lenders in person, as well as communicated with others via their blogs, email and through member support. In addition, many happy borrowers have spontaneously provided testimonials and feedback on their Lending Club experiences.

Here are some of the functionality enhancements you have been requesting that are now available at www.lendingclub.com:

Multiple Accounts: You can now open several accounts and enjoy the following benefits:

Both a Borrower and a Lender Be: It is now possible to be both a lender and a borrower, either concurrently or consecutively.

Apply for Multiple Loans: You can now submit multiple loan requests if your credit profile allows it and if your total indebtedness (including loans that are still “in funding”) remains within our credit policy guidelines.

Note that your borrower/lender accounts are considered separate, thus you will need to use a different email address for each account you open, and for the protection of your account, you will need to go through the verification and authentication process each time you open a new account.

Check out our Performance Statistics: In an effort to be as open as possible about the performance of the Lending Club community, we are committing to publish performance data weekly. You can see the first edition of this page here. Congratulations to Lending Club borrowers for their outstanding on-time payment record thus far, with no defaults and only 2 late payments (although less than 30 days late) currently after 6 months of operation.

Ask the Borrower a Question: How many times have you had a burning question you'd like to ask before lending to a particular borrower? Now you can ask any borrower a question regarding an active listing. Borrowers will see your question privately and, if answered, both your question and the borrower’s response will be published on the borrower’s loan details page for the benefit of all lenders.

Make Yourself and Your Friends $25 Richer: Many of you have taken advantage of our $5 referral bonus to date. To sweeten the deal, we have increased this to $25 for both you and your friend for each loan application or funded lender's account resulting from a referral. In addition, if your friend transfers an initial deposit of more than $1,000 to start lending, we will increase the bounty to $50 for both parties. Moreover, we have made inviting friends easier: you can now type in your friends’ email addresses manually in addition to being able to import your webmail contacts. If you prefer, you can send a referral link around, or publish it on your site. Here it is:
https://secure.lendingclub.com/refer.action?referrer=YourScreenName

Just remember to replace YourScreenName with... well.... your Lending Club screen name.

Update Your Profile: You can now update your personal profile information (name, address, email, etc.), as well as your affiliations (add, delete, etc.).

Change Your Bank Account: It is now possible to change your bank account. To protect the security of your account, you will need to provide your old account number and password.

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

Better Site. Together.

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.

We are blessed with a very vocal user base and have received many valuable comments since we launched. Your feedback continues to guide our ongoing efforts to improve the site. Here are some of the features we have recently added to further improve user experience on Lending Club.

Minimum loan request has been lowered to $500
It is now possible for borrowers to request a loan in the amount of $500 to $25,000. We hope this added flexibility will meet your needs.

LendingMatch™ minimum is now $500
Great news for lenders! You can now use LendingMatch™ to generate portfolio recommendations with as little as $500. It is necessary to lend at least $500 to use LendingMatch™ because the algorithm tries to allocate your investment into at least 20 fractions of loans, for diversification purposes. Since the minimum investment in each loan is $25, you need at least $500 in total. The minimum amount you can lend without using LendingMatch™ remains unchanged at $25.

Invite your Facebook friends and earn referral bonuses
It is now easier to invite your Facebook friends to join Lending Club. When you register for an account, you can choose up to 10 friends to invite at that time. You can then invite 10 Facebook friends per day (in accordance with Facebook's privacy policy) to Lending Club and receive $5 for each person who becomes a member. Let all of your friends know that you that have money to lend them or get them to join so that they can lend to you!

Improvements to My Account, Portfolio Summary
We have revamped the My Account area for lenders. This section now contains more detailed portfolio analysis and individual loan performance information, such as payments received to date, loan status, expected payments, remaining payments, and more.

Adjustments to Expected Monthly Payment amount
We improved and made more accurate the way we represent rounding issues. The system internally keeps track of 12 decimals, but payments from the borrowers’ external bank accounts are being rounded up or down to the second decimal. As a result, lenders will see a minor difference in the “Expected Monthly Payment” column on their Account Summary.

….and a big welcome to Arizona borrowers!
As we mentioned in an earlier post, we are now welcoming Arizona borrowers. Stay tuned for updates on our quest to serve every single state.

We hope these new features will improve your experience on the site. We will post updates about new features every few weeks. In the meantime, please keep your feedback coming! We take your opinions very seriously! Although some of them are funny, too!