I am thrilled to hear about the new Lending Club IRA account to allow peer to peer lending in an retirement account. EntrustCAMA, part of the Entrust Group, is the account administrator. I heard of the Lending Club IRA only a few weeks ago through the comments by a beta tester on my initial review of Lending Club post.

Why is this the Lending Club IRA Big News? Read the rest of this entry »

Looking at my new fascinating woopra statistics, I clicked on a few of the keywords that appear in the dashboard. I noticed that there are several advertisements (adwords) that appear in Google results related to peer-to-peer lending. So I searched on several related key terms to see what appeared in the google paid search results. I thought that I would save the results so that I can later compare how these results change over time since changes in the paid advertisements may indicate changes in the P2P lending market.

Key Word: Prosper
Results: 14 million results
Paid Search results include: Read the rest of this entry »

I was expecting Prosper’s Quiet Period to go similar to Lending Club’s — Quiet for a few months and then come back out better than ever. Therefore, I am amazed at what I just read…

Prosper Receives a Cease and Desist Order from the SEC

Considering that Prosper was already in a quiet period and no longer talking bids on loans, this seems like an unnecessary step by the SEC, but they may have felt it was necessary to make a point. I also wonder if they had not received complaints because of their misleading marketing — including quotes in the media on horribly misleading default statistics. Or maybe it was their complete failure in collections as Prosper continued to focus on origination and not on operations.

I have transferred out all the money in my account possible and am glad that I stopped lending with Prosper some time ago.

Quotes from the Cease and Desist Letter
There were some interesting points to the cease and desist letter that I would like to highlight (any emphasis added is mine).
Read the rest of this entry »

I planned to blog in commiseration with Tom about being denied for a loan. Tom was denied for a Zopa loan and I was rejected for a GE Money Bank credit card through Amazon. GE Money Bank took 10 days to tell me that they could not verify my identity despite the promise on Amazon.com of a 30 second approval process. I have a 800 credit score and provided all information including a phone number and they could not verify my identity. They did not bother calling to verify and customer service told me the process is computer automated. Ten days for a computer program to return results? I doubt it…

Sorry /Rant Off
I’ll skip the remainder of my planned rant about Amazon’s relationship with GE Money Bank Read the rest of this entry »

Loanio has continued to claim be almost available since I started blogging on P2P lending. Loanio in fact has been promising its imminent release since before I started blogging P2P lending — back in November of 2008.

For about the past year (maybe more), Loanio has been requesting you to sign up for their email announcements to stay informed of their launch. It is likely that Lending Clubs SEC troubles have impacted Loanio and caused a delay, but why do they keep announcing they will be launching soon? Launch and then announce if you don’t know when you are launching.

Loanio has announced their own launch via email and announced the Read the rest of this entry »

I received a Prosper Marketplace update via email. There were several interesting items, but it the last item stood out:

Legal Agreement Revisions
A minor change has been made to the following legal agreements, to clarify that selling or buying a recommendation or endorsement is not allowed. Please refer to the links below to view these changes.
Borrower Registration Agreement [PDF]
Lender Registration Agreement [PDF]
Group Leader Registration Agreement [PDF]

This portion of the update seems to directly target Read the rest of this entry »

Lending Club just sent an update via email about their latest filing with the SEC. Unfortunately, they are still in a quiet period so they do not say much about the ongoing outlook, but it seems they may be one step closer to completing the requirements to return to P2P lending. So maybe Lending Club will survive.

The filing was posted to the SEC website at 5:30 PM eastern time toiday (Friday June 20th) and I am writing this less than an hour later.

Link to the Lending Club filings documents. I have not had the chance to read through the whole filing yet but I did Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to Lending Club for winning a Webby Award. Other recipients included David Byrne, will.i.am of the Blackeyed Peas, Stephen Colbert, Lorne Michaels, Michel Gondry, and Tim and Eric. Many, many other organizations won awards including the Peace Corps which won a Webby award for a government website.

Lending Cub gave a tongue-in-cheek acceptance speech for their 2008 Webby award, but it seems to have been the only words available to a company under the a SEC imposed quiet period. That is the speech was completely silent: Read the rest of this entry »

Due to the Lending Club quiet period, the Lending Club referral program has ended. The program was a good one — I earned over $300 in referral fees through this website by blogging about my experience creating a portfolio, creating a video, gathering advice for new lenders, the inception of the referral program and the Lending Club bonus program.

I hope that they bring back the referral program after the quiet period is over.

From the quiet period email sent out today:

Q2. What about referrals?
A2.1 The current referral program is terminated. If you have referred someone who has already signed up as a lender or a borrower, or if you have been referred by someone and have already signed up as a lender or a borrower, you will be receiving your referral payment within the next few days.

Technorati Tags: lending club, peer lending, p2p lending, affiliate programs, referral code

Photo credit: TheTim

Tom interviewed Chirag Chaman who is the CEO of the soon to be released new P2P lending site Fynanz which will focus on student loans. It seems like a small niche since there are already governemnt backed loans in this category and the rates are rather reasonable at banks. However, with the price of tuition continually out pacing inflation and standard loan sizes, this may be a niche worth pursuing.

I found the answer to the following question interesting Read the rest of this entry »