What a great month. As I shared earlier this week Lending Club and Prosper combined crossed over the $1 billion mark this month. And as if to celebrate both companies turned in very strong months. The total new loan volume in May was $57.9 million up over $4.2 million from April.
To give you an idea of the tear that Lending Club and Prosper are on just 12 months ago, in May 2011, total loan volume between the two companies stood at $24.1 million. The industry has grown by 140% in just the last 12 months.
Lending Club Issues $45 Million in New Loans in May
Lending Club is on cruise control. For the last six months they have added around $3 million to their total volume every month. They issued a record 3,400 loans in May which means their average loan amount is staying relatively steady at just over $13,000 which I think is good. They are now the goliath of the industry and with this rapid growth their market share continues to increase.
Below is their 18-month chart that illustrates this fast but steady growth. The black line is the 3-month moving average and you can see that for the last few months it has trended in an almost straight line up.
Prosper Up Over 10% From The Previous Month
After chugging along for several months with just small monthly increases, Prosper had a great May issuing $12.8 million in new loans. This was up from $11.6 million last month and $5.6 million from May of 2011.
The most unusual thing about this month is that Worth-blanket2 was not the largest investor. After being the number one Prosper investor every month since they came on the platform 12 months ago, in May they were overtaken by Index_Plus. According to Lendstats, Index_Plus invested just over $2.3 million in May whereas Worth-blanket2 was down a little from their typical volume to $2.1 million. New investor tolerant-responsibility051 was a distant third with just under $500,000 invested.
As far as I could tell no other investor put in more than $100,000 into Prosper this month which means that Prosper continues to see strong support from retail investors. With no big new institutional investors it looks that most of the 10% bump in volume this month came from the retail investors. Below is Prosper’s 18-month chart.
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Good stuff Peter. Thanks for sharing.
I wonder when we’ll hit an inflection point in the growth curve. Prosper appears to be growing at a steady pace, Lending Club appears to have accelerating growth.
@Chris, You’re welcome.
@Rich, Good question. I don’t see it happening any time soon. The way I see it demand is only going to increase for many years to come. One day the curve will slow down but I think we are 10+ years off before that happens.