Lending Club

LendingClub is a financial services company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was the first peer-to-peer lender to register its offerings as securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and to offer loan trading on a secondary market. At its height, LendingClub was the world's largest peer-to-peer lending platform. The company reported that $15.98 billion in loans had been originated through its platform up to December 31, 2015.

LendingClub enabled borrowers to create unsecured personal loans between $1,000 and $40,000. The standard loan period was three years. Investors were able to search and browse the loan listings on LendingClub website and select loans that they wanted to invest in based on the information supplied about the borrower, amount of loan, loan grade, and loan purpose. Investors made money from the interest on these loans. LendingClub made money by charging borrowers an origination fee and investors a service fee.

LendingClub also makes traditional direct to consumer loans, including automobile refinance transactions, through WebBank, an FDIC-insured, state-chartered industrial bank that is headquartered in Salt Lake City. The loans are not funded by investors but are assigned to other financial institutions.

The company raised $1 billion in what became the largest technology IPO of 2014 in the United States. Though viewed as a pioneer in the fintech industry and one of the largest such firms, LendingClub experienced problems in early 2016, with difficulties in attracting investors, a scandal over some of the firm's loans and concerns by the board over CEO Renaud Laplanche's disclosures leading to a large drop in its share price and Laplanche's resignation.

In 2020, LendingClub acquired Radius Bank and announced that it would be shutting down its peer-to-peer lending platform. Existing account holders will continue to collect interest on existing notes until each loan is paid off or goes into default, but no new loans are available for individual investing. It is also no longer possible to sell existing loans through a secondary marketplace, as was once the case.

History

LendingClub was initially launched on Facebook as one of Facebook's first applications. After receiving $10.26 million in a Series A funding round in August 2007, from venture capital investors Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners, LendingClub was developed into a full-scale peer-to-peer lending company.

On April 8, 2008, LendingClub temporarily suspended new lender registration, canceled its affiliate program and entered a "quiet period" while it awaited approval to issue promissory notes to lenders. On June 20, 2008, LendingClub filed an S-1 statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking the registration of $600 million in "Member Payment Dependent Notes" to be issued on its website. On August 1, 2008, LendingClub filed an amendment to its Form S-1 outlining new interest rate formulas as well as more details on a "resale trading system". On October 14, 2008, LendingClub announced its completion of the SEC registration process, posted the filed prospectus on its website, and resumed new lender registration. Notes issued on or after October 14, 2008 represent LendingClub securities rather than direct obligations of the ultimate borrower and are tradable (can be bought and sold) on the Foliofn trading platform. In March 2009, LendingClub raised $12 million in a Series B funding round led by Morgenthaler Ventures.

Pre-IPO growth

In April 2010, the company raised $24.5 million in a Series C funding led by Foundation Capital and joined by existing investors including Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners.

In August 2011, LendingClub raised an additional $25 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures and Thomvest, owned by the Thomson family of Thomson-Reuters. This led to LendingClub earning a $275 million post-money valuation and an increase of $80 million in valuation from the preceding year. Thomson-Reuters founder Peter J. Thomson also invested an unspecified amount of his personal fortune into LendingClub. In fall 2011, LendingClub's headquarters moved to downtown San Francisco; its earlier offices were located in Sunnyvale and Redwood City. Co-founder Soul Htite moved to China to start Dianrong.com, a peer-to-peer lending company based in Shanghai.

In 2012, the company employed about 80 people, with Renaud Laplanche continuing as the company CEO and chairman of the Board of Directors. The company averaged about $1.5 million in loan originations daily, with a total of $600 million since its founding. In April 2012, LendingClub's SEC registration from 2008 was renewed for $1 billion USD in Member Payment Dependent Notes and became effective on April 10, 2012. In June 2012, the company received $15 million in new funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and $2.5 million of personal investments from John J. Mack. Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker joined Mack on LendingClub's board of directors. This led to a $570 million valuation of the company. In November 2012, LendingClub surpassed $1 billion in loans issued since inception and announced they were now cash flow positive.

In May 2013, Google Capital purchased a stake in LendingClub. LendingClub also began partnering with smaller banks in order to help streamline their small loans operations. In June 2013 the company partnered with Titan Bank in Texas and Congressional Bank in Maryland in order to help them facilitate loans that would have been otherwise unprofitable for them.Lending Club CEO on Getting a Loan Without a Bank
CNBC March 14, 2013; Accessed March 16, 2103

Initial public offering (IPO)

In March 2014, LendingClub began providing loans to small businesses. In April 2014 LendingClub acquired Springstone Financial. On August 27, 2014, LendingClub filed for an IPO with the SEC, the offering taking place in December 2014. On December 10, 2014, the company raised almost $900 million in the largest U.S. tech IPO of 2014. The stock ended the first trading day up 56%, valuing the company at $8.5bn.

Car loans and mortgages

Laplanche told ''Forbes'' in April 2015 that LendingClub would expand into car loans and mortgages. LendingClub also announced a partnership with Google to extend credit to smaller companies that use Google's business services. The company signed partnerships with Google, Alibaba.com, BancAlliance, and HomeAdvisor, including vetting community bank lenders for BancAlliance (a group of 200 banks), in order to send people on its platform to various community finance institutions. That year LendingClub partnered with Opportunity Fund, announced by former President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative. The partnership intended to provide $10 million to small businesses in areas of California that are underserved by lenders. LendingClub and other small business lenders partnered with Sam’s Club to deliver its “business lending center” product.

Scandal and struggle, 2016-2017

Like other peer-to-peer lenders including Prosper, Sofi, and Khutzpa.com, LendingClub experienced increasing difficulty attracting investors during early 2016. This led the firm to increase the interest rate it charged borrowers on three occasions during the first months of the year. The increase in interest rates and concerns over the impact of the slowing United States economy caused a large drop in LendingClub's share price.

In April 2016, a LendingClub employee reported to Laplanche that the dates on approximately $US 3 million in the firm's loans appeared to have been altered. LendingClub's internal auditor engaged an outside firm to investigate the report. This investigation found additional problems with loans, including that $US 22 million in loans which had been sold to the Jefferies investment bank did not in fact meet the bank's investment criteria. LendingClub bought these loans back from the bank and resold them.

The ''New York Times'' reported that the investigation found that Laplanche had not disclosed to the board that he owned part of an investment fund which LendingClub was considering purchasing. ''The Wall Street Journal'' also stated that Laplanche was found to have not fully disclosed what he knew about the problematic loans.

On May 6, LendingClub's board made it clear to Laplanche that he no longer had their confidence, leading to his resignation on 9 May. ''The Wall Street Journal'' reported that Laplanche had been fired by the board. Three of the firm's other managers had also been fired or had resigned by that time as a result of the problematic loans. LendingClub's stock price fell by a further 34 percent after Laplanche's departure was announced. This placed the stock price at 70 percent of the price at the time of the firm's initial public offering. As a result of the incident, the Securities and Exchange Commission was reported to be investigating LendingClub's disclosures to investors.

In December 2017, the ''Financial Times'' reported that LendingClub "has struggled to overcome the effects of a governance scandal last May", and that the firm "has battled to keep big investors buying loans" despite improvements to its internal governance. These challenges have led it to raise its loss estimate, and have led to further drops in its share price. At this time many other peer to peer lending companies were also experiencing difficulties.

End of P2P platform, 2019-2020

In an interview with Business Insider in December 2019, executive Valerie Kay noted that LendingClub had switched focus to institutional investors as well as its traditional peer-to-peer lending through a new project called "Scale", focused on delivering representative samples of loans instead of individual loans - labeled its "Select" program. LendingClub had grown to $10.8 billion in annual loan originations in the year 2018.

In April 2020, the company announced it would lay off around one third of its employees in anticipation of the economic downturn resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In August 2020, the company discontinued its secondary trading platform, hosted by Folio, reducing liquidity for existing peer-to-peer investors.

In October 2020, the company ceased all new loan accounts on their website as part of restructuring into a neobank after the acquisition of Radius Bank.

As of December 31, 2020, LendingClub will no longer operate as a peer-to-peer lender.

Takeover of Radius Bancorp, 2020-

In February 2020 LendingClub announced that it had agreed to buy Radius Bank for $185 million in cash and stock. The deal was the first time since the 2008 financial crisis that a U.S. "fintech" lender bought a regulated bank. In 2021, it was intergated into the LendingClub brand.

Radius had been founded in 1987 as First Trade Union Bank by the carpenters union in Massachusetts, using pension funds. The bank, however, struggled during the Subprime mortgage crisis, when it invested heavily in commercial real estate. In 2014, it was renamed Radius Bank. In June 2016, private investors had acquired approximately 95% of Radius Bancorp in response to Dodd Frank regulations.

Peer-to-peer business model

Overview

LendingClub enabled borrowers to create loan listings on its website by supplying details about themselves and the loans that they would like to request. All loans were unsecured personal loans and could be between $1,000 - $40,000. On the basis of the borrower’s credit score, credit history, desired loan amount and the borrower’s debt-to-income ratio, LendingClub determined whether the borrower was creditworthy and assigned to its approved loans a credit grade that determined the payable interest rate and fees. The standard loan period was three years; a five-year period was available at a higher interest rate and additional fees. The loans can be repaid at any time without penalty.

Only investors in 39 US states were eligible to purchase notes on the LendingClub platform.

Investors were able to search and browse the loan listings on LendingClub website and select loans that they wanted to invest in based on the information supplied about the borrower, amount of loan, loan grade, and loan purpose. The loans could only be chosen at the interest rates assigned by LendingClub, but investors could decide how much to fund each borrower, with a minimum investment of $25 per note.

Investors made money from interest. Rates varied from 6.03% to 26.06%, depending on the credit grade assigned to the loan request. The grades assigned to these requests ranged alphabetically from A to G, with A being the highest-grade, lowest-interest loan. Each of these letter grades had five finer-grain sub-grades, numbered 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest sub-grade. LendingClub made money by charging borrowers an origination fee and investors a service fee. The size of the origination fee depended on the credit grade and ranges to be 1.1–5.0% of the loan amount. The size of the service fee was 1% on all amounts the borrower pays. The company facilitated interest rates that were better for lenders and borrowers than they would receive from most banks. It averaged between a six and nine percent return to investors between its founding and 2013. However, because lenders were making personal loans to individuals on the site, their gains were taxable as personal income instead of investment income. Therefore, income from LendingClub loans could be taxed at a higher rate than investments taxed at the capital gains rate.

Loan ownership

After the notes were issued, LendingClub purchased the loans from the issuing bank and notes became the obligations of LendingClub, and not of the ultimate borrower: LendingClub has promised to pay the noteholder monies it receives from the borrower less its service fees, while the holders of LendingClub notes have the status of unsecured creditors of LendingClub. This means that there is a risk that the investor may lose all or part of the investment if LendingClub becomes insolvent or declares bankruptcy, even if the ultimate borrower continues to pay.

Until August 2020, investors had the ability to put notes up for sale before the notes have reached maturity. This service was offered in a partnership with FOLIOfn Investments which charged a 1% fee on note sales, making LendingClub the first peer-to-peer lending network to offer a secondary market for peer-to-peer loans. Other peer-to-peer lending networks, such as Khutzpa.com, subsequently also partnered with FOLIOfn Investments to offer a secondary market. Effective August 28, 2020, the secondary market for trading Lending Club notes was discontinued.

As of 2016, a high proportion of funds for LendingClub-facilitated loans came from hedge funds. During May of that year, LendingClub was seeking to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans as bonds as part of a strategy to overcome difficulties in accessing sufficient funding.

Credit risk

When initially founded, LendingClub positioned itself as a social networking service and set up opportunities for members to identify group affinities, based on a theory that borrowers would be less likely to default to lenders with whom they had affinities and social relationships. It developed an algorithm called LendingMatch for identifying common relationship factors such as geographic location, educational and professional background, and connectedness within a given social network.

After registering with the SEC, LendingClub stopped presenting itself as a social network and maintaining that social affinity will necessarily reduce the defaulting risk. It now presents the algorithm just as a search tool for investors to find Notes they would like to purchase, using borrower and loan attributes such as the length of a loan term, target weighted average interest rate, borrower credit score, employment tenure, homeownership status, and others. To reduce default risk, LendingClub focuses on high-credit-worthy borrowers, declining approximately 90% of the loan applications it received as of 2012 and assigning higher interest rates to riskier borrowers within its credit criteria. Only borrowers with FICO score of 660 or higher can be approved for loans.

The statistics on LendingClub's website state that, as of December 31, 2016, 62.3 percent of borrowers report using their loans to refinance other loans or pay credit card debt.

Loan performance statistics

As of June 30, 2015, the average LendingClub borrower has a FICO score of 699, 17.7% debt-to-income ratio (excluding mortgage), 16.2 years of credit history, $73,945 of personal income and takes out an average loan of $14,553 that s/he uses for debt consolidation or for paying off credit card debts. The investors had funded $11,217,348,156 in loans, with $1,911,759,192 coming from Q2 2015. The nominal average interest rate is 14.08%, default rate 3.39%, and an average net annualized return (net of defaults and service fees) of 8.93%. The average returns of investment for LendingClub lenders are between 5.47% and 10.22%, with 23 straight quarters of positive returns as of the second quarter of 2013.

Banking services

LendingClub operates an online-focused community bank headquartered in Lehi, Utah. LendingClub is a member of the FDIC and an Equal Housing Lender as well as a member of the NYCE SUM ATM network.

Consumer banking

LendingClub formerly had one physical banking branch located in Boston when it was operating as Radius Bank. Customers have access to online banking and mobile apps available for iOS and Android devices and offers free ATM reimbursements worldwide.

Partnerships

The bank launched its first fintech partnership with LevelUp in 2013. This was followed by a partnership with Prosper to provide personal loans in 2015.

Radius Bank launched another fintech partnership in July 2015 with Aspiration.

Commercial banking

LendingClub Bank provides depository services and financing to small and middle market businesses. The bank has been a Small Business Administration (SBA) Lender since 2009, primarily focused on lending in the northeast region of the U.S. In May 2016, the bank expanded its SBA lending program nationally with the establishment of a new government-guaranteed lending team. In December 2016, the bank acquired the equipment financing division of NewStar Financial.

API Banking

On 29 October 2020, the bank has progressed its partnership with the Treasury Prime application programming interface (API) with the roll-out of its Business API Banking Software and sandbox testing technology.

Recognition

In 2011 and 2012 the company was named to as one of the AlwaysOn Global 250. LendingClub is the winner of the World Economic Forum 2012 Technology Pioneer Award. It has been recognized by Forbes as one of America’s 20 most promising companies in 2011 and 2012, and by Fast Company as one of the ten most innovative financial companies in the world. It was named one of the Disruptor 50 by CNBC in May 2013 and 2014, as a disruptive innovator in next generation financial services. In 2014, LendingClub was recognized by Inc. as one of the 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America at #248. Renaud Laplanche, the company’s founder and CEO, also received The Economist Innovation Award in 2014 for the consumer products category.

See also

* Comparison of crowdfunding services
* Disintermediation

References

Further reading

* Peter Renton, Renaud Laplanche (2012), ''The Lending Club Story''

External links

*

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Companies based in San Francisco
Financial services companies established in 2006
Peer-to-peer lending companies
Financial services companies based in California
2006 establishments in California
Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange
2014 initial public offerings