Marketplace lending is certainly a growing industry. No industry grows in a straight line and marketplace lending is enduring — and will endure — its own growth challenges as it matures as an industry. There are some great resources out there for observers, analysts, investors, employees and just anyone really with an interest in the marketplace lending industry to dig deeper and learn more.
We’ve assembled a list of some of the best marketplace lending resources around, many of which we use ourselves in Tradestreaming’s cover of the space.
Marketplace Lending Data
LendingClub’s own data: If you want to go to the source, start with Lending Club’s statistics. At a high level, the largest marketplace lender tracks its own trends in aggregate at the platform level both quarterly and yearly. If you want to go deeper, the marketplace lender makes its historical returns by investment grade information available. For the power user, directly download complete loan data for all loans issued through a particular time period, including the current loan status (Current, Late, Fully Paid, etc.) and latest payment information.
MonJa: Monja provides market insights for marketplace lending through some analytics tools the firm has developed. It also publishes monthly trend updates on its blog, teasing out important information like underwriting and delinquency trends. The blog discussion is a good mix of charts and the written word. Monja also produces its own
marketplace lending indexes based on total returns.
Orchard Platform’s Blog: Orchard is a venture capital-backed technology solution for investors and originators in the marketplace lending industry. Given the firm’s position in the marketplace lending ecosystem, it has a data-level view of much of the fund flows at any moment in time. Orchard publishes trends and insights periodically on its own blog, both in article and report format.
Marketplace Lending Publishers, Blogs, Commentary
The Financial Times’ Kadhim Shubber has had his finger on the pulse of marketplace lending (and on fintech, in general). He publishes his reporting on the FT’s Alphaville section, which requires a free registration. It’s worth it to access Shubber’s coverage of the marketplace lending space.
Lend Academy: Peter Renton was an early influencer in the marketplace lending industry (back then, we all called it peer to peer lending). He was buying loans on both Prosper and LendingClub and writing about his experiences and performance. Lend Academy grew out of that perspective, albeit now with more tools and broader industry coverage. Peter is a co-owner of the LendIt conference (see below), the reigning heavyweight champ of marketplace lending conferences.
debanked: debanked began its life as the Merchant Processing Resource before rebranding to its current state in 2014. That’s because founder, Sean Murray has deep experience in the merchant cash advance industry. Given Sean’s perspective, debanked’s daily coverage includes a more technical, industry-insider approach to online lending. There’s also a print magazine and a forum, if that’s your thing.
Fintech Junkie: The Fintech Junkie blog is authored by Frank Rotman, a 20+ year veteran of the fintech industry. Frank is a founding partner of QED Investors, an early-stage investment firm focused on fintech. The QED portfolio includes leading fintech startups like Prosper, Credit Karma, and SoFi. Frank’s professional background at Capital One and his investment experience in the marketplace lending industry make him definitely worth reading.
Marketplace Lending Cross-Platform Roboadvisors
Lending Robot: An investor can use LendingRobot to monitor the overall “health” of a portfolio, including current returns, forward looking returns, and average times to loan maturity of marketplace loans across platforms. The investing tools can also assist with deploying capital: for example, users can build rules governing an investment strategy using LendingRobot. Using varying-levels of sophistication, roboadvisors like Lending Robot can automatically invest and manage marketplace lending portfolios drawing from both primary and secondary markets.
Nickel Steamroller: Nickel Steamroller’s roots are in marketplace lending data. The site began by offering analytical tools to dissect loan data coming out of the big two marketplace lenders, LendingClub and Prosper. You can still find some of these tools on the site but NS has morphed into a full-fledged roboadvisors, providing investors automated tools to deploy capital and manage portfolios of marketplace loans on multiple lending platforms.
Marketplace Lending Events
LendIt: LendIt was one of the first marketplace industry conferences (at the time, the industry was called P2P) and launched in 2013 with a yearly summit in NYC. The first event was successful and the next year, the event moved to San Francisco and tripled in size. Now the company hosts marketplace lending events in the US, Europe, and China. Lend Academy’s Peter Renton (mentioned above) was one of the co-founders behind this event.
AltFi: This UK-based company was founded in 2013 by two veterans of the investment industry. The company runs 2 yearly summits on the alternative finance sector. The AltFi site also provides daily news and data on the alternative investing industry, which includes some coverage of the marketplace lending industry.
Marketplace Lending Presentations
4 essential presentations worth saving on the marketplace lending industry: Every industry has its own seminal reports, presentations, or slideshares that helped formalize the big ideas percolating around the experts, professionals, analysts, and investors. Marketplace Lending is no different — it has its own important presentations that many in the industry turn to for inspiration, market sizing, or just to use for their own presentations on the subject.
