The Madden v. Midland case has been a closely followed case for over two years by the marketplace lending industry; bills are now being introduced to hopefully fix the ambiguity around the case; Lend Academy shares the history of the case and perspectives from Adam Levitin, professor of law at Georgetown University, Nat Hoopes, executive director of the Marketplace Lending Association, and Brian Korn, partner at the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. Source
China Rapid Finance has filed for an IPO in the US; it will be the fifth online lender to trade on a public US exchange and the second Chinese online lender to list in the US; Lend Academy provides more details on China Rapid Finance and the IPO in their article; the firm is hoping to raise $100 million from the IPO; it is a peer-to-peer lender matching borrowers with investors and does not lend from its balance sheet; the platform targets underserved consumers and uses thousands of data points from alternative data sources including information on work history, payments, e-commerce, telco, search and social data for its credit underwriting. Source
Ron Suber has been involved with Credible since 2015, investing in both the Series A and Series B rounds as well as acting in an advisory role; Suber will now spend about one day per week helping Credible in a broad range of activities from fundraising to helping the team as the company grows; Credible CEO Stephen Dash noted that despite headwinds many other industry participants faced, Credible continues to grow; Ron Suber will play a role in navigating the growth they expect going forward; the company also announced a pilot for a credit card marketplace which launched today. Source
Croudify has launched a platform for the Lending Club secondary market; Lend Academy provides details in their article; platform is built using Lending Club's secondary market API created last year; the platform provides trading capabilities, data analytics and pricing on the listed notes. Source
Lend Academy provides details on the emergence of online auto lending and the market opportunity for both lenders and technology providers in their article; Lending Club is the largest marketplace lender to begin offering auto loans; Finova Financial has launched a new title loan product; AutoFi and AutoGravity are two companies offering innovative online services for the car buying process; in the used car market, Blinker has also been successful in developing a marketplace for car buyers and sellers; LendIt USA 2017 will be featuring a panel on the future of buying and selling vehicles including insight from many of these companies. Source
Funding Circle has announced a new equity investment of $100 million; the funding round was led by Accel and included existing investors Baillie Gifford, DST Global, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Rocket Internet, Sands Capital Ventures, Temasek and Union Square Ventures; the funding brings the firm's total capital raised to $373 million and makes it the largest and best capitalized SME lending platform in the world. Source
Lend Academy's Peter Renton provides insight on his marketplace lending investment strategies for Lending Club and Prosper loans; outlines the options available for investing and highlights best performing loan grades; reports details of loan filters he is using across his eight accounts. Source
The Innovative Lending Platform Association (ILPA) has released SMART Box for small business lending disclosure and transparency; Lend Academy provides more details and insight from Kathryn Petralia of Kabbage in their article; the SMART Box is intended to provide standardized pricing, cost of capital and verbiage that borrowers can use for credit analysis and comparison. Source
Lending Club and Prosper allow for tax efficient investing on their platforms through an IRA; Lend Academy provides details on opening an IRA with Lending Club or Prosper and explains why investing in P2P lending is best done through an IRA. Source
The marketplace lending industry has evolved with investments coming from a range of market channels; to help marketplace loans integrate even further into the mainstream the industry needs involvement from 'gatekeepers' and needs to educate the asset allocator community; Lend Academy discusses the investment consultant process to bring new types of investments to asset allocators; to help facilitate this communication, LendIt is offering asset allocators free tickets to LendIt USA 2017 and is planning a special event at the conference for asset allocators, hosted by fund managers. Source