We are winding down the year and approaching the time when the news cycle starts slowing down and everyone begins to focus on family and the holidays. However, a few companies in the online lending space have snuck in announcements as we end out the year, sharing major origination milestones.
Kabbage
Today, Kabbage announced they had crossed the $4 billion mark. They have now lent to more than 130,000 small businesses which they claim is the largest customer base of any online small business lender. Other significant milestones for the company this year include their $250 million equity raise, securitizing $550 million and finalizing a $200 million revolving credit facility.
LendingHome
This week LendingHome announced it had crossed $2 billion in mortgage loans for homeowners and real estate investors. LendingHome is the largest originator in the real estate crowdfunding space. It took LendingHome 30 months to cross the first billion in originations and just 12 months to cross the second. Total originations are across 10,000 homes.
Funding Circle
Funding Circle UK crossed the £3 billion (approx. $4 billion) mark in small business lending for their UK business. They officially launched in 2010 and have served 30,986 small businesses across 43,300 loans. The company also announced that they have lent $5 billion globally, including $1 billion in the US. Funding Circle currently lends in the UK, the US, Germany and the Netherlands.
LendingClub
For a long time the Lend Academy team has wondered about the breakdown of originations across LendingClub’s products outside of consumer loans. LendingClub quietly announced total small business originations of $500 million since 2014 in a recent blog post. The focus of the blog post was to discuss their new credit policy to small businesses which reduced minimum qualifications. Their small business lending business pales in comparison to their consumer business, but given the new credit policy we could see this product line be a bigger part of the business going forward.
Conclusion
With the exception of the public companies in the industry, it isn’t often we get insight into originations at private companies. This is one reason we wanted to highlight them here and celebrate their successes. Having said that, we have all learned in recent years that origination growth isn’t the only metric companies should use to measure their success. Companies will ultimately thrive if they can continue to grow originations in a measured way while generating positive cash flow as well as yield for their investors.
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