Every Saturday I bring you the latest news from the world of peer to peer lending. These are the best of the news articles and blog posts from around the web that I shared on Twitter this past week.
We have quite a variety of articles for you this week. As usual there are a couple of interesting posts from Anil of Random Thoughts. There was a couple of Lending Club updates from prominent bloggers, my guest post on LearnBonds, a paper from the UC Davis Law Review from last year which I found very interesting. The last article I want to mention is from Marc at Lending Club Experience. After almost a year Marc has decided to liquidate his Lending Club investments and end his experiment with investing via the trading platform. He says he will be back again in the future and I certainly hope he is. I know I have learned a great deal from Marc about secondary market trading and I have appreciated him sharing his findings with us. Enjoy your weekend.
Forbes – Thomson-Reuters Director Doubles Down On Lending Club
Financial Times (UK) – Social lending cuts out the banks
My Dollar Plan – Are You Still Using Lending Club?
Random Thoughts – Lending Club Loan Amount: Defaults for Loans with < 8% Interest Rate
LearnBonds – What’s Holding People Back from Peer to Peer Lending?
UC Davis Law Review (PDF) – The Misregulation of Person-to- Person Lending
Indiegogo – p2ploanstats.com funding campaign
Lazy Man and Money – Lending Club Update – July 2012
Lending Club Experience – One Year of Lending Club: The (Getting) Ins and (Getting) Outs of Lending Club
Random Thoughts – Lending Club Loan Amount and Interest Rate
Financial Mail (South Africa) – Social Lending: Bypassing the Bank
I scanned through the UC Davis paper. Interesting indeed. A good reminder of the often-forgotten risk of investing through not-yet-profitable platforms. If LC or Prosper go under, non-institutional lenders like us will lose everything, won’t we? Any idea how far LC is from going positive?
My analysis says Q2-Q3 2013. Check the guest post I made on here a few weeks back. I wouldn’t worry too much though, given their $40M in cash.
Frankie, I agree with Bryce – breakeven will come some time next year, certainly for Lending Club and most likely for Prosper as well. But I wouldn’t say that if LC or Prosper go under we would automatically lose everything. There are contingency plans in place to continue servicing the loans so money will keep flowing in – once creditors are paid the remainder should flow straight to investors. Of course, this scenario has never been tested so we may never know for sure – suffice it to say I think it is an unlikely scenario.
Wow, all those guys that said they’d be happy & willing to pay for a Lendstats type site are really coming through. I’m staggered by the outrageous amount of money that’s pouring into that proposed alternative…………….p2ploanstats.com through Indiegogo. It’s like a stampede! 🙂
Considering that we haven’t posted any actual tools yet, I can understand why the buy-in is low. We will likely have another round of funding after we get a basic site up and running so people can see what we’re actually capable of before putting down their cash.
You may have better luck if you at least put up your own “coming soon” type page at p2pLoanStats.com, as opposed to the registrar’s bogus landing page. Which by the way contains an iFrame that triggers some antiviruses…
In other words, you’re probably going to need at least a minimal amount of getting your act together before you can get any real amount of trust and cash from the public.
Hi Frankie!
Such a page is already in the works. Stay tuned for updates over the next few days. Also, thanks for letting us know about the iFrame. We’ll have it taken care of shortly.
As I predicted in a conversation with Peter before you guys even started, there would be a lot of talk, but very little money actually put in play. So this is no surprise to me either. I sincerely do wish you the best of luck. Through no fault of your own, I believe you will need luck to overcome the “everything should be free” disease that permeates most of the internet.
And no, I didn’t send any money your way because I didn’t use Lendstats or NSR in my investment decisions, & don’t anticipate using your site either.