Seattle based Lending Robot, a 3rd party tool for investors to automate bidding on Lending Club and Prosper has raised 3 million US$ form Moscow based VC Runa Capital. The founders Gilad Golan and Emmanuel Marot had initially created a solution to automate their own investments on Lending Club. The growing needs to automate such investments convinced them to develop this further in the publicly available service Lending Robot. Lending Robot is free for the first 10K managed investment and beyond that charges users a small yearly fee. To comply with regulation, Lending Robot registered with SEC as an Investment Advisor.
The main advantage of the service is that it bids for investors a high speed. This is crucial because bidding on Prosper and Lending Club is very competitive and the most sought loans are filled very fast.
Today p2p lending marketplace Lending Club and Google launch a new pilot program in partnership to facilitate low-interest financing to eligible Google partners. The program leverages Lending Club’s ability to provide access to credit in a highly automated, cost-efficient manner, and allows Google to purchase the loans, thus investing its own capital in its partner network to drive business growth. Lending Club will service the loans.
Eligible Google partners will have access to financing with low interest and no fees, enabling them to invest in business development and other growth opportunities, hire additional staff and plan for future expansion.
“This first of its kind program enables Google to invest its own capital in the growth of its partners,” said Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club. “This is a new delivery model for financial services; this program opens up many possibilities for Lending Club partners to enable credit for consumers and business owners.”
Google for Work has built a network of more than 10,000 partners in recent years, including resellers, consultants, and system integrators, which help Google distribute its applications and services. The company recently launched a new incentive program for partners, boosting the rewards for top performers. The partnership with Lending Club is part of this expanded incentive program.
Currently, the pilot program is available to Google reseller partners in the U.S. who meet certain eligibility criteria. Eligible partners can obtain two-year loans of up to $600,000 to invest in growth initiatives. With an interest-only structure in the first year and a fully amortizing second year, the loan payback schedule is designed to match the cash-flow profile of growth investments.
Zencap, the German peer-to-company lending marketplace which launched in March 2014, will launch in the Netherlands in February 2015. This is Zencap’s third target market after Germany and Spain. The Zencap team has grown to over 60 employees and Zencap has originated 7 million EUR in loans so far.
Several p2p lending marketplaces managed to grow the loan originations in December despite the Christmas season. Especially Prosper had a record month. I added one more service. I do monitor development of p2p lending figures for many markets. Since I already have most of the data on file I can publish statistics on the monthly loan originations for selected p2p lending services.
Table: P2P Lending Volumes in December 2014. Source: own research Note that volumes have been converted from local currency to Euro for the sake of comparison. Some figures are estimates/approximations.
Notice to p2p lending services not listed: If you want to be included in this chart in future, please email the following figures on the first working day of a month: total loan volume originated since inception, loan volume originated in previous month, number of loans originated in previous month, average nominal interest rate of loans originated in previous month.
In October 2012 I started p2p lending at Bondora. Since then I periodically wrote on my experiences – you can read my last report here. Since the start I did deposit 14,000 Euro (approx. 17,000 US$). My portfolio is very diversified. Most loan parts I hold are for loan terms between 36 and 60 months. Together the loans add up to 19,528 Euro outstanding principal. Loans in the value of 2,158 Euro are overdue, meaning they (partly) missed one or two repayments. 1,853 Euro principal is stuck in loans that are more than 60 days late. I already received 10,316 Euro in repaid principal back – this figures includes loans Bondora cancelled before payout. I reinvested all repayments.
Chart 1: Screenshot of loan status
At the moment I have 280 Euro in bids in open market listings and 3 Euro cash available.
Chart 2: Screenshot of account balance
Return on Invest
Currently Isepankur shows my ROI to be over 27.56%. In my own calculations, using XIRR in Excel, assuming that 30% of my 60+days overdue and 15% of my overdue loans will not be recovered, my ROI calculations result in 25.0%.Continue reading →
Yesterday was a very exciting day for Lending Club and p2p lending as a whole. I must say I was awed when I saw the opening price of around 25 US$ as that put the company valuation around 9 billion US$. Looking through the coverage the excitement is certainly shared:
