Personal Loan Portfolio

New here? You may want to subscribe to the RSS feed or browse the site map. Thanks!

Lending Club announced lots of goodness on their blog this morning. Overall, the updates sound positive. I have grouped the updates together and summarized them below:

• Affiliate program: The first item of interest to me is the affiliate program was formally announced that I had previously mentioned. The deal is $25 for the affiliate and the person referred — the same as Prosper’s affiliate program.
  

  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=PersonalLoanPortfolio

  note: replace my Lending Club ID with yours.

  Lending Club still needs to address a few of the items that were were discussing at the P2P No Bank forums where this was originally informally announced, but this is an excellent set of changes to introduce to the P2P lending market.

• Features for Lenders: Lending club also introduced two features for lenders. You can now ask the borrower a question and view loan performance statistics. The stats are looking great so far, but at under 400 loans to date I would not draw any great conclusions. Also, a statistics page is not nearly as great as how Prosper releases the data for analysis, but again this is a good start.
• Profile Changes: You can update your profile and change your bank account.
• Policy Changes: Finally, although these changes my be technical in nature, I am grouping them as policy changes because they are fundamental to the Lending Club market. Lending Club is now allowing a Lending Club participants to both borrow and lend and take out multiple loans. As I have mentioned before, I am not keen on borrow and lend as a strategy, but there may be more legitimate reasons to both borrow and lend money. The multiple loans do not bother me much and the functionality is likely something that users are requesting. If Lending Club did not allow multiple loans, borrowers would go to another service like Prosper to request a second loan anyway, so they might as well offer this service.

To summarize, this is a great collection of updates at Lending Club which shows that they are ready to be a much larger participant in the P2P lending market.

Update: The Lending Club program was updated to a $50 bonus if you fund your lending account with $1,000.