People-to-People Lending Service Now Available to Alumni of Georgia Tech, Kansas State and University of Michigan

SUNNYVALE, CA – October 31, 2007 - Since the early 1900s, homecoming has marked the return of millions of alumni looking to reconnect and give back to their alma maters across the country. Lending Club, the rapidly growing people-to-people (P2P) lending service, today announced the availability of its affinity-based lending service through the websites of top university alumni associations to offer a new way to lend and borrow money among fellow alumni. Lending Club is the first in the P2P lending industry to provide co-branded lending applications to online communities, including the alumni associations at Georgia Tech, Kansas State and University of Michigan.

"Whether it's helping fellow alumni pay off student loans or launch new enterprises, we offer a rewarding new way for alumni to invest directly in each other," said Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club. "Lending Club's unique, affinity-based service enables people to bypass the banks to get better rates by borrowing and lending directly within communities they trust."

Lending Club launched at the end of May exclusively as a Facebook application. Since then, the Lending Club community has rapidly grown beyond Facebook to more than 22,000 users who have loaned and borrowed more than $2 million within the community. By partnering with alumni associations across the country, Lending Club further expands its affinity-based lending service across top alumni communities. Lending Club will enable these alumni associations to connect with social networks like Facebook, combining alumni benefits offered by the associations while leveraging the social interaction and viral nature of Facebook and other online communities.

"Our mission is to cultivate loyalty, tradition and lifelong relationships. Lending Club helps leverage these relationships and build new ones by giving our members the opportunity to invest in fellow Wolverines," said Jerry Sigler, senior vice president and chief financial officer of the University of Michigan Alumni Association.

To help people identify lending and borrowing opportunities, Lending Club uses its proprietary affinity-matching technology, LendingMatch™, that looks at factors such as where a person went to school, where they grew up or what they do for a living. LendingMatch™ instantly recommends diversified portfolios based on these affinities and ensures the creditworthiness of each borrower.

Lending Club is available to individual borrowers with credit scores at or above 640. Using Lending Club, borrowers can apply for personal loans of $500 to $25,000 to be funded by one or many individual lenders. To date lenders have funded 90 percent of all approved loan requests. Lending Club handles user authentication, bank account verification, credit checking, credit reporting, funds transfers and collections.

Three questions: CEO Renaud Laplanche

Hi Renaud – What’s the latest news at Lending Club?

After we opened Lending Club beyond its original Facebook environment last month, we started developing partnerships that will extend Lending Club to a variety of existing communities and networks, beginning with three great universities.

Lending Club is available today to Kansas State and Georgia Tech alumni. It will be available in about a month from now to the 420,000 alumni of the University of Michigan. We chose to make this announcement during the homecoming season, which traditionally has marked the return of millions of alumni looking to reconnect and give back to their alma maters across the country.

What is the significance of this announcement?

I believe this is the first time a financial service has combined the member benefits of alumni associations with the social interaction and viral nature of a social network (sorry, I mean a social utility) like Facebook.

Whether they become Lending Club members through Facebook or via their alumni association websites, our friends the K-State Wildcats, the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets and the Michigan Wolverines will be able to lend and borrow money within their respective trusted alumni communities.

What makes alumni relationships relevant for lending and borrowing?

Person-to-person lending grows faster when a level of trust exists between borrowers and lenders. Adding in whole communities of alumni with that trust built in dramatically increases our ability to extend great opportunities to everyone on the platform.

Potential lenders feel closer to their fellow alumni than they do to the general public: they feel both a desire to help and a stronger sense of trust due to their shared connection. If you can make a 12% return (which is the current average of all lenders’ portfolios on Lending Club), and at the same time help fellow alumni, it becomes a no-brainer for lenders.

Borrowers also feel more compelled to make payments on time because they know that their lenders are fellow alumni who are counting on these payments. This keeps defaults minimal and, in turn, reinforces trust on the lenders’ side. You can expect more announcements on this blog shortly as new online communities join the Lending Club ecosystem every week.

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.

People-to-People Lending Service expands beyond Facebook, Invites Lenders and Borrowers to Come Together and Bypass Banks

SUNNYVALE, CA – September 13, 2007 - Americans are currently facing a credit crisis, and an increasing number are taking advantage of emerging alternatives such as people-to-people lending. Lending Club, the rapidly growing people-to-people (P2P) lending service that launched as a Facebook application in May 2007, today announced the public availability of its services with the launch of LendingClub.com. Lending Club connects lenders and borrowers based upon shared affinities, enabling them to bypass banks to secure better interest rates on loans.

Lending Club is the first in the P2P lending space to help people identify lending and borrowing opportunities using a proprietary affinity-matching technology that looks at factors such as where a person grew up, went to school or what they do for a living, and ensures that they are creditworthy (based on their credit score and other characteristics). The new site, LendingClub.com, introduces tools for building diversified loan portfolios composed of pieces of 20 to 30 individual loans and hosts a forum for financial experts to share their knowledge with the Lending Club community.

"During this credit crunch, people-to-people lending provides a valuable alternative, and keeps money flowing when people need it the most," said Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club. "We promote responsible lending and borrowing with fixed-rate installment loans which allow borrowers to pay off 100% of their loan within 36 months. By cutting the banks out, both lenders and borrowers get a better deal and help each other."

Lending Club launched at the end of May exclusively as a Facebook application. Since then, the Lending Club community on Facebook has grown to more than 15,000 users who have loaned and borrowed more than $1 million among themselves. With the launch of LendingClub.com, the company brings its affinity-based lending services to the broader public, helping to connect borrowers and lenders the same way it did within Facebook.

Lending Club's proprietary technology, LendingMatch™, helps lenders quickly identify the best loan opportunities based upon personal affinities such as geography, work place, education and associations. LendingClub.com's LendingMatch sorts among affinity criteria that includes 47,000 US cities; 1,000 companies; 500 government agencies; 6,300 colleges and universities; 1,600 national associations and other organizations; as well as thousands of Facebook groups and networks. The LendingMatch technology allows people to quickly discover previously unknown connections, enabling them to borrow and lend money among trusted sources and rapidly build diversified portfolios.

The new site also includes "Better Rates Together," a blog community that features expert advice on P2P lending and personal finance.

Lending Club is available to individual borrowers with credit scores at or above 640. Using Lending Club, borrowers can apply for personal loans of $500 to $25,000 to be funded by one or many individual lenders. To date lenders have funded 90 percent of all approved loan requests. Lending Club handles user authentication, bank account verification, credit checking, credit reporting, funds transfers and collections.

Lending Club recently secured $10.26M in Series A financing led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

Lending Club launched on Facebook approximately 100 days ago and has just surpassed the $1 million dollar loan mark.

As the first financial service to ever launch on a social network, and one of a handful of Day 1 Facebook applications, we are pleased to see that Facebook has more than doubled its active user base to 40 million and that there are now 4,000 Facebook applications. We checked in with Facebook on our progress and are appreciative of their continued support:

“Facebook Platform was designed to enable innovative business opportunities for all application developers. We're pleased to see Lending Club, one of the first Facebook applications, leveraging the social graph to build a successful business around Facebook Platform.”

Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager for Facebook

During this credit crunch, we have received a few questions about the credit quality of our borrowers. Lending Club borrowers all have prime credit due to our requirement for a minimum FICO score of 640. Our experience to date shows the value of prime borrowers, as our average FICO score on issued loans is 704 and we have not had any defaults on qualified loans.

From an interest rate perspective, our average interest rate is just over 11%.

We are still seeing a considerable amount of bicoastal activity, with California leading the lending states and Florida leading the borrowing states.