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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.

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!

After my last post soliciting feedback, comments and ideas last week, we received over 40 comments via emails and Facebook posts. We value your input immensely. Please keep it coming and expect more new features to be released in the next few weeks based on your feedback and the existing product roadmap.

In the meantime, we would like to offer an update on the new features released this week:

How we set interest rates. Many of you requested this information to be disclosed and we agree it was long overdue. It is now available at https://secure.lendingclub.com/info/how-we-set-interest-rates.action. Renaud will write a separate post on this later this week.

Relist a loan request. If a loan request is not fully fulfilled at the expiration of a 14-day period after the listing date, borrowers now have the ability to relist their loan. In that case, the funding is reset to 0 and lenders’ committed funds become available again.

The loan ID remains identical so that lenders can track relisted loans and commit funds again for another 14-day period if they wish to do so. When relisting a loan request, borrowers can modify title and update of expand the loan description.

Time left before closing. Loan listings and search results now include an extra column showing time left before closing or expiration. Many lenders have asked for this information to be made available in the listings and search results to gain the ability to quickly compare loans and include the “time” factor in their decision to fund a loan.

Note: LendingMatch also factors in time (and amount) left to close.

Issued loans. Now you can browse completed loans that have been issued to the borrowers. We will keep on giving updates on origination amounts, and will make more information, data and statistics available on https://secure.lendingclub.com in the next few weeks. Displaying issued loans is a first step in this direction.

Thank you again for your feedback. Feel free to comment on new, existing, and missing features by posting comments on this blog, on the Facebook application page or by email at feedback@lendingclub.com. Happy borrowing and lending!

Better rates. Together.

Rob from Lending Club

We are now entering our 4th week helping borrowers and lenders bypass the banks and get better rates. Most of our borrowers can register and apply for a loan in less than 10 minutes. Lenders have been telling us how simple, easy, and fast LendingMatch is.

We are very far from perfection at this point, and are excited to be working on many improvements. You will see a number of new features and enhancements coming up in the next few weeks. Over the last three weeks, we have received feedback from Facebook's forums, our Lending Club group on Facebook, this blog, our customer service line and directly by email to various members of our team. We appreciate all feedback, good or bad.

In addition to all existing channels, we added on Wednesday a “feedback” link on every single page of https://secure.lendingclub.com and would love to gather even more feedback at feedback@lendingclub.com.

We are making all efforts to be responsive to your inquiries, analyze your behavior on https://secure.lendingclub.com, understand common trends and patterns and adjust our development priorities based on these trends. We truly believe in building up our platform with you as well as for you.

We look forward to your comments, thoughts, and ideas. We will build a better platform together.