Archive

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 A Cash detail reconciles money that flows in and out of your account by breaking out such transactions as added/withdrawn funds, earned interest, bonuses, service fees, etc.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.

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.

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.

Going beyond Facebook has sparked quite a lot of press and the interest of more users, most of whom are unfamiliar with P2P Lending. Along with the opening of our website, we have also received several requests to expose raw data and performance statistics about loans and lenders. We believe this is very important in order to maintain full transparency and allow users to see the benefits of Lending Club for themselves. While we work on ways of exposing this information in a private, secure and efficient manner, we have already taken some steps in this direction. Here are some datasets we have made available:

Top Lenders by Performance

The Lender Rankings page contains a list of the top 100 performing portfolios (one per lender) containing at least $50, in order of estimated return on investment. Lenders are identified by screen name to protect their privacy. The table displays the following information:

• Portfolio rank

• Lender screen name

• Portfolio name

• Amount of initial investment

• Estimated return on investment

Click to Enlarge Image

Calculation of estimated return on investment

The estimated return on investment is calculated by taking the average interest rate of a portfolio and deducting the Lending Club servicing fee, defaults and late loans expected to default.

• The average interest rate excludes the origination fee for each loan (origination fee varies according to each loan grade)

• The late loan amount is calculated by deducting monthly payments already made from the principal

• Loans more than 1 month late are estimated to default at a 50% clip

• Default losses (projected defaults for late loans and actual defaults) are calculated using a 90% clip (10% recovery rate) for default loans

• Paid/repurchased loans are included in the current average interest rate calculation. This may change in the future

• The late/default rates are projected out to one year

• Lending Club servicing fees are 1% for all loans

• All loans are included in the calculation for late/default rates in the formula regardless of age

Formula:

Estimated ROI = Average Interest Rate - (Loss due to Late Loans - Loss due to Default Loans) - Lending Club Servicing Fee

Where:

• Loss due to Late Loans = Sum(50% * (unpaid percentage) * (interest rate of the late loan))

• Loss due to Default Loans = Sum(90% * (unpaid percentage) * (interest rate of the default loan))

• Lending Club Servicing Fee = 1% / 3 years = 0.33%

For those that want to use this information as input to other computations, we also expose this information via a downloadable XML file (available here) that gets updated daily.

Member Map

Available directly on our homepage, this feature displays information about current lenders, borrowers and issued loans plotted on a Google Map. Members are identified by screen name, and location is based on zip code only (with a certain level of Geocode randomization) to ensure members’ privacy. When an icon is clicked, a call-out displays the following information:

Borrowers / Issued Loans	Lenders
• Screen name	• Screen name
• Title / Link to the loan page	• Amount of portfolio initial investment
• Amount of the Loan	• Location (city, state)
• Amount left to fund
• Location (city, state)
Click to Enlarge Image	Click to Enlarge Image

This information is also available in XML format for external consumption here, and the file is updated on a daily basis.

As noted, we will be releasing additional data in the near future. Meanwhile, we hope the above information will be helpful to those who are evaluating Lending Club.

Better Rates. Together.

Building a p2p lending company from the ground up is a great challenge, and with each big release of features and functionality, our team takes a few minutes to cheer and then begins to look ahead.

Now that we have expanded beyond Facebook and can serve borrowers and lenders in (almost all of) the United States, we are extending and revising our product roadmap. This is our chance to look ahead and confirm where we want to go next. We have lots of ideas – some clearly need to happen, some are great opportunities, and some are fairly speculative.

Some ideas will be rolled out to the site without fanfare and be made available generally. We will have others where we will use a test-driven approach.

To accomplish this, we may survey our current members for their input on proposed features and pilot programs to ensure that we take your own needs and experiences into account as we evolve the site. We may also ask people who are not yet members for input in order to evaluate different marketing
approaches.

If you have ideas that you would like to see implemented or concepts that could make Lending Club more useful, please send us your thoughts at feedback@lendingclub.com. We want Lending Club to address the market’s needs, and you are all important players in that market.