During the week I share the latest p2p lending news on Twitter as it happens. Then every Saturday I take the most interesting news items and blog posts from the past week and share them here.
Wall Street’s siren song lures P2P lenders into treacherous seas from the Financial Times – This journalist thinks that p2p lending is growing too fast and platforms will become too aggressive in pursuing yield.
How A Trillion-Dollar Market Remains Hidden In Plain Sight from Techcrunch – Charles Moldow of Foundation Capital revisits some of his ideas put forward in his white paper and presentation at LendIt 2014.
RateSetter Claims Top Spot in UK Peer to Peer Lending World from Crowdfund Insider – Ratesetter became the first UK platform to issue £30 million of loans in one month.
Semantic Classification and Consumer Lending from Orchard – David Snitkof looks at the power of language in predicting loan performance.
Funding Circle records strong year as peer-to-peer lending booms from The Evening Standard (UK) – Funding Circle is becoming an increasingly important source of capital for small businesses in the UK.
Would you bypass a bank for your next mortgage? from CNBC – A look at SoFi’s move into home mortgages.
Next Day Funding on Upstart from Upstart – Good news for borrowers on Upstart, they will get their money within 24 hours of accepting their loan terms.
My Returns at Lending Club & Prosper for 2014Q3 – 10.9% ROI from LendingMemo – Simon shares the details of his quarterly returns on Lending Club and Prosper.
Facebook in Talks with Peer-to-Peer Lending Sites from The Information – The full article is behind a paywall but the first three paragraphs and headline tell the story.
Recap: P2P Lending + Investing Conference from Funded by Crowd – Roundup of the American Banker conference this week including many interesting quotes from presenters.
Lending Club and Prosper bolster their senior ranks from Silicon Valley Business Journal – Both Lending Club and Prosper announced key additions to their management team this week.
From the Lend Academy Forum
The Lend Academy forum is where investors go to discuss p2p lending. Below are some topics that were being discussed this week.
Lending Club bankruptcy remote vehicle – Interesting discussion and poll about the lack of a bankruptcy remote vehicle for retail investors at Lending Club.
Overqualified borrower problem – What percentage of loans get paid off early? And why does it happen so much?
Available Cash N/A – What does N/A mean in your available cash balance at Lending Club?
The Orchard article is nothing but a useless exercise in data mining. Where are the out-of-sample performance results of their “bad ratio” classifier?
I agree that the Orchard article could have gone into more depth and evaluated their classifier with another random sample of data. It was still an interesting exercise.
Most of the “bad words” made sense as risky behavior and many were business terms “salon”, “franchise”, “wholesale”, etc.