Nov
Kintera to Connect Alumni with Lending Club
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Kintera, which offers several product lines (but no clear strategy) such as fund raising, software, donor relations, website creation, and email marketing, branched out again by recently announcing a new P2P lending program to Lending Club to access Kintera’s Alumni network. (Currently Kintera is trading at under $2 per share on the Nasdaq.)
Kintera® Inc. (NASDAQ: KNTA) today announced that Lending Club, an online people-to-people (P2P) lending service, has joined the Kintera Connect Partner Program. The new Kintera Connect open application integration platform enables developers and partners to integrate directly with Kintera technology, and extend their value within the nonprofit sector.
As a Kintera Connect partner, Lending Club will integrate with Kintera’s Alumni Engagement Center Solution to provide a seamless link of information from users on Kintera’s alumni site to LendingMatch™, Lending Club’s proprietary technology that helps match lenders with borrowers using connections established through social networks, associations and online communities.
“Being a Kintera Connect partner allows us to share our advanced P2P lending technology with top alumni networks nationwide who are powered by Kintera,†said Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO for Lending Club. “What this means is that for the first time alumni can go beyond donations; they can invest in each other and in their community, bypassing the banks to get better rates.â€
Kintera Connect, the company’s open application integration platform, enables clients and partners to integrate with Kintera technology. Kintera Connect platform features applications provided by Kintera and its partner network such as customizable browser tools that enable clients to utilize the extensive segmentation capabilities of Kintera’s technology quickly and easily directly from the browser toolbar…
Blah, blah, blah… I have worked in both finance and IT and that still makes very little sense. If you removed every buzz word, you would be left with “Kintera Connect to Link Alumni to Lending Club.” Read more of Kintera’s press release on P2P lending if can stand the buzz-word barrage. Instead, I recommend that you check out LendingClub’s blog article on the topic — much better written.
Anyway, what that press release really seems to mean is that Kintera will connect Lending Club to Kintera’s network of alumni oganizations. Mashable has an article on the topic.
My negativity on the poorly written press release should not reflect badly on LendingClub though. I might have to check out their lending program as well. It seems I found at least one blog that prefers LendingClub over Prosper (link removed 32/5/2008 because blog is now 404). I do like the color orange…
Thanks for the plug. With nearly two years of work for Prosper down the drain (GL reward system goes away, I don’t get any help with known fraud accounts, I don’t get emails from Shira… WT%?!) I would advise anyone looking at Prosper to look away and go with something with better credit transparency, privacy (no more borrower begging) and better portfolio setup and tracking over at the ‘LC’. Prosper’s management is their biggest flaw. More egos than Bruce Campbell could fend off (Army Of Darkness fame)!
My two cents,
Jeff
Great blog… mind if I blogroll it?:)
Thanks for stopping by to comment. I’d appreciate it if you added me to your blog roll. Thank you! Interesting experiences you mentioned on your blog. The two things that strongly I liked about Prosper was the open API and the $25 referral fee. I wanted the open API to be able to dig through the data and maybe program a mashup. Is there anything similar that LendingClub offers?
By the way, did you happen to notice my article on the mortgage lending crisis and how it should change your P2P lending strategy? There are some cities in the USA that are teetering on the edge of disaster due to poor mortgage lending practices. Unfortunately, mortgage brokers had no long term skin the game since they resold mortgages and cashed their commission checks. Then banks that bought the loans from the mortgage brokers simply repackaged the loans and resold them at a profit. Quite a mess we have.
I am rather passionate about personal finance so I hope that translates into some traction as a blog P2P lending blog.