The monthly income of a borrower has been a key part of my investment strategy at Lending Club for almost two years now. Yet, this important filter was not easily available to all investors on Lending Club’s site, you had to download the Excel spreadsheet and do your filtering there. Not any more.
On Friday Lending Club made a couple of small but important improvements that will help investors. It added two new filters to the Add Filters pop-up (see screen shot above) – you access that screen by clicking on More Filters from the Browse Notes screen.
The Monthly Income Filter
I have always thought it was crazy that Lending Club did not make this filter available to all investors. If you see how I am investing in Lending Club this year you will see that monthly income is a key component in all my filters. Now any investor using Lending Club’s site to invest can filter based on monthly income.
The Loan ID Filter
Savvy investors have long known how to find the details of any loan with just the loan ID (add the loan number to the end of this URL: https://www.lendingclub.com/browse/loanDetail.action?loan_id=) but it has never been available as part of the loan filters. Now, investors can just enter the loan ID in the Browse Notes screen.
Will these changes cause me to start using Lending Club’s site to invest? No. The filters are still not flexible enough for my liking – you can do a lot more in Excel. And serious investors have many third party tools available for investing today such as Interest Radar, PeerCube and NickelSteamroller. Having said that these changes at Lending Club are a step in the right direction.
Finally, I wanted to share this news story that was on the CBS Sunday Morning program yesterday. There was a six minute segment on the new sharing economy with a nice feature on Lending Club (skip to the three minute mark for the Lending Club piece). I mention this now because Lending Club actually became a trending topic on Google yesterday and my blog had the most traffic ever for a Sunday as people found Lend Academy while doing their research. Clearly this story had widespread appeal.
Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of LendIt Fintech, the world’s first and largest digital media and events company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series. Peter has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The New York Times, CNBC, CNN, Fortune, NPR, Fox Business News, the Financial Times, and dozens of other publications.