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Google and Lending Club Pilot Offering Loans to Businesses

wiseclerk

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.

International P2P Lending Services – Loan Volumes December 2014

wiseclerk
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.
Investors living in markets with no or limited choice of local p2p lending services can check this list of marketplaces open to international investors.


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.

Review of My Bondora Loan Portfolio After Q4/2014

wiseclerk 8 Comments

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 →

Bitcoin P2P Lending – a Primer in 8 Steps

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This is a guest post by Radoslav Albrecht who is the Co-founder and CEO of Bitbond – a global Bitcoin peer-to-peer lending platform based in Berlin

When Zopa went live in 2005 it was the first online peer-to-peer lending platform. At the beginning many people thought it wasn’t the best idea to lend money to individuals. The majority felt better by bringing their savings to a bank. Critics didn’t realize that banks were handing out the money to individuals and businesses in quite the same manner – only that through P2P lending this happens at lower operating costs and better customer convenience.

Since early 2009 another new financial innovation came up – the digital currency bitcoin. Entire books have already been written about bitcoin. We will only scratch its surface here. Bitcoin can be looked at from at least two perspectives, the technology perspective and the application perspective. We won’t dive into the technology here. When discussing bitcoin P2P lending, the application of bitcoin as a currency is the relevant perspective.

1. Bitcoin as a currency

As a currency bitcoin offers a number of significant advantages. You can send bitcoins to any location in the world and they will be transacted in a few seconds. It’s very similar to sending an email. Therefore the best analogy between bitcoin and a wire transfer is that between email and a letter. The letter can take up to a couple of days depending on where you’re sending it. The email gets to the receiver instantaneously, and so does bitcoin. Continue reading →

Bondora Ratings Create a Single Eurozone Lending Marketplace

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This is a guest post by Pärtel Tomberg, CEO of Bondora.

This month we started the roll-out of Bondora Ratings, a loan application rating system based on the proprietary credit scoring model, with the aim to bring better predictability and consistency of the returns for investors active on Bondora platform.

Our initial aim for developing a credit scoring model was to bring the best banking practices to peer lending. Banks might have failed at providing people with affordable credits, but they have done a few things right, such as developing strong credit scoring models, that have helped them generate premium returns for their investors. With Bondora Ratings we are bringing credit scoring model to individual investors so they could maximize their returns in the same way banks do.

Being a platform that facilitates the exchange between lenders and borrowers, we believe it is our responsibility to bring the best practices, such as credit scoring, to peer lending; thus, making it an effective, efficient and mutually beneficial process for both parties. Eventually, Bondora Ratings will allow credible borrowers get a better rate for a loan, while investors will receive a predictable return level.

On top of bringing banking practices to peer lending, we saw a need for a simple, transparent and unified way to represent the risks and potential returns associated with a particular loan. Until recently, our investors used their own sophisticated models to evaluate the risks and plan their investments at Bondora. We have supported the initiative by offering a wide range of filters and providing extensive data export sets, and we will continue to support those investors in the future by providing a Trading API.

However, as the platform grows, we see an increasing inflow of investors that do not have a need or desire to engage into extensive number crunching. The historic performance of peer lending platforms, and Bondora in particular, indicates that peer lending provides premium returns compared to other assets classes and investors want a simple and easy way to earn those premium returns. Continue reading →