Transparency remains a sticking point for online lenders
WTF is crowdfunding?
9 alarming facts about online lending
With acquisition of Zencap, Funding Circle expands into Europe
Funding Circle will be expanding ints online lending platform into Europe with its acquisition of Zencap, a German lender with a foothold in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.
Speigel Online, who broke the story, says just 520 loans have been made over the Zencap platform, worth €35 million (£25.6 million, $39.6 million). Zencap had been identified as the fastest growing online lender in Europe and had received international attention when Victory Park Capital, a lender to online lenders, announced that it would open a €230 million lending facility to access loans on the Zencap platform.
Funding Circle, based in the UK, has demonstrated a willingness to internationalize its peer to peer small business lending platform. It first entered the US market via an acquisition of Endurance Lending in October 2013. Now, with Zencap as part of its international portfolio, Funding Circle is turning its attention to European expansion.
According to Business Insider, Funding Circle intends to do more acquisitions like Zencap to ramp its growth;
It’s been a lot better than we expected to be honest,” Desai tells Business Insider of the US expansion. If you look at it 2 years ago, when Funding Circle came together with Endurance, the old Endurance business was probably doing about $300,000 (£196,200) a month in new lending. If you look at it now, we’re doing around $30 million (£19.6 million) a month in the US. It’s 100 times as big in 2 years. And that’s 30% of our business now, the US. –Funding Circle CEO, Samir Desai
Funding Circle’s own most recent financing round closed in April 2015, raising $150M as part of a Series E round, in which BlackRock, DST, and Temasek participated. Funding Circle has raised nearly $300M in total and is reportedly valued at over $1 billion, a large startup for the UK fintech ecosystem.
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Peter Renton on How the Lending Club IPO changes everything
On the inaugural This Week in Crowdfunding podcast, David Stark and Zack Miller discuss all things crowdfunding.
First up, we do a hard-punching news roundup. We chat about Kickstarter’s recent rule changes, why the real estate crowdfunding industry is currently receiving so much PR, and a recent study that sheds some light on optimizing crowdfunding campaigns.
We interview Peter Renton of LendAcademy and the Lendit conference, who’s a true pioneer in the marketplace lending industry. We ask Peter on where the industry is headed. Pay attention to Peter’s description of the rumored, upcoming Lending Club IPO and how he expects this to be a seminal moment in the crowdfunding industry.
Lastly, in our product review section of the podcast, we take a closer look at NickelSteamroller which is a great site to both analyze the marketplace (p2p) lending industry in general, as well as analyze individual securities at the portfolio level.
That’s a wrap for the first of what we hope to be incredibly engaging and informational podcasts we’ll be publishing weekly.
Listen to the FULL episode
Investing in people with potential — with Upstart’s Dave Girouard
What if you’re a recent Stanford college grad with a computer sci degree and need to borrow money? (crickets)
What if you’re an investor and would like to be able to loan to these (future) high performers? (Upstart…)
Dave Girouard, co-founder and CEO of Upstart, joins us on the Tradestreaming Podcast today to talk about how his firm is enabling lending to — and investing in — young, high potential people who haven’t had enough time to build out a long credit history.
Listen to the FULL episode
About Dave Girouard
Dave is the co-founder and CEO of Upstart.
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Creating a new asset class of personal loans — with Lending Club’s Scott Sanborn
In 2012, Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club, joined me on the Tradestreaming Podcast.
So much has happened in the peer to peer lending space since then (including the fact that they no longer call it “peer to peer”): Lending Club just surpassed $4 billion in underwritings, rolled out business loans in addition to personal, and filed for IPO.
Chief Marketing Officer, Scott Sanborn joins me, Zack Miller, on the Tradestreaming Podcast to discuss why investors are flocking to Lending Club and where his business will go in the near future.
Listen to the FULL episode
About Scott Sanborn
Scott is the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Lending Club.
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Powering the marketplace lending ecosystem — with Matt Burton
This is the next instalment of our series on crowdfunding. You can access my other interviews on crowdfunding here and here.
Matt Burton, cofounder of the Orchard Platform joins me, Zack Miller, on the Tradestreaming Podcast.
Crowdfunding is a huge, transformative trend in investing. Both individual and institutional investors alike are turning to crowdfunding to deploy their monies.
Matt’s company, Orchard, provides the technology infrastructure of many of these new platforms (what Burton calls the “marketplace lending ecosystem”). Given his ringside seat to what’s transpiring in the p2p lending (and broader, in crowdfunding in general) industry, Matt addressed why investors are so interested in this new form of investing, how individual investors and professionals are using these crowdfunding platforms, and more.
Listen to the FULL interview
About Matt
Matt Burton is co-founder and CEO of the Orchard Platform and has spent his entire career helping build, scale, and optimize the internet’s top advertising exchanges (Google, Admeld, LiveRail).
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Investing in people with peer to peer loans – with Lending Club’s Renaud Laplanche
I have to admit: investing in peer to peer loans didn’t initially appeal to me.
I thought it would be hard to assess the risk in lending to individuals — after all, that’s what banks get paid the big bucks for, right?
But 5 years after Lending Club first launched its website, the firm has pioneered a whole industry, not just to say a new asset class. There have been over $1B in p2p loans underwritten and investors like me are now using p2p loans as a core holding in the fixed income part of their portfolios.
Founder Renaud Laplanche joins me on Tradestreaming Radio to talk about how the p2p loan industry cures some major inefficiencies in the market for capital, does a better job sizing up and personalizing risk, and how his firm and industry might just eat the banking system’s future lunch.
Listen to the FULL episode
Continue reading “Investing in people with peer to peer loans – with Lending Club’s Renaud Laplanche”
Why I’m a converted believer in investing in P2P loans
If you’re like millions of people, you’re probably worried about your net worth.
Pretty worried.
The market’s up and then, it’s down. Jobs are being created and lost. Banks are stable and then they lose $3B seemingly overnight. And politicians? Nobody seems to have a strong plan to get us through and certainly not the political will to see it through.
It’s not entirely clear if the economy is recovering or not.
Investments: riskier, less diverse, zero confidence
If you have investments, you’re probably experiencing the following:
Volatility spikes: The market has the great ability to lull people into a false sense of security and then, wham! You get periods like the beginning of May where it feels like the world is ending. Nothing looks good right now. Nothing feels right, either.
Diversification doesn’t seem to be working: It may be exchange traded funds doing it or just a general move towards passive investing, but all types of investments are moving more in tandem. When stocks go down, they bring down other “safer” assets. The theory of diversification isn’t providing the benefits it promised. That’s where we are — when things are bad, it seems that there is nowhere to hide.
Lack of confidence in reaching financial goals: Many investors are just throwing up their hands. No más. They feel the stock market is rigged (it is, somewhat) and don’t want a part of it. But in an environment where bonds and CDs pay so little, underfunded-for-retirement investors need to reach for more risky assets and are forced to play a game that they don’t want to play.
What if I could tell you that you can triple the returns on the fixed income (bonds) part of your portfolio without taking on more risk?
Continue reading “Why I’m a converted believer in investing in P2P loans”