Lending Club Spreads the Wealth

by Brian Solis

Lending Club is going national across all 50 states, opening up its unique p2p lending business.

LendingClub.com is open to individual borrowers with credit scores at or above 640 and a debt-to-income ratio of 30 percent or less. Using LendingClub.com, borrowers can apply for personal loans of $500 to $25,000 to be funded by one or many individual lenders. Lending Club handles user authentication, bank account verification, credit checking, credit reporting, funds transfers and collections.

Over the course of the last six months, LendingClub.com lenders have earned an average 12.2 percent annualized return after fees and losses, and defaults on the loans have remained under one percent, which is attributed to the sense of community and trust inherent in the existing connections between members, such as their online social networks, alumni associations, organizations, geography and credit profiles.

LendingClub.com members have loaned and borrowed more than $3.5 million within the network, growing 100 percent monthly since it launched six months ago. In response to this rapidly increasing demand, Lending Club is expanding today to all 50 states and is now available at www.lendingclub.com, on social networking site Facebook and through partnerships with top university alumni associations.

To help people identify lending and borrowing opportunities, Lending Club uses its proprietary affinity-matching technology, LendingMatch, which looks at factors such as where people went to school, where they grew up, what they do for a living and their network associations. LendingMatch is the fastest way to build diversified portfolios based on these affinities and ensure the creditworthiness of each borrower.

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