Los Angeles-based Patch of Land has expanded its executive leadership team to help manage and continue business growth and market positioning for the online real estate platform; the firm has hired Robert Greenberg as its chief marketing officer and Min Lee as its chief financial officer; over the past year the firm has been building a strong leadership team with a number of new hires including CEO Paul Deitch; the firm's founders, Jason and Brian Fritton, have substantial growth prospects for the firm and expect to continue building on the firm's compound annual growth rate of 290%. Source
Patch of Land has filed a Form D 506c with the Securities and Exchange Commission; it seeks to raise $3.2 million in debt capital with a minimum investment of $250,000; the company has already raised $1.5 million; the company raised a total of $23.6 million in 2015 and has facilitated over $100 million in loans. Source
Online real estate lender and crowdfunding platform Patch of Land has hired Matthew Zall to serve as its new chief investment product officer; the new hire occurs as Patch of Land plans to expand into the single-family rental market, identifying an opportunity to capitalize on the 24 million US single-family units valued at over $6 trillion; Zall's experience includes single-family loan structuring at Blackstone Group subsidiary B2R Finance; he has also worked as a commercial real estate trader at J.P. Morgan and Bear Stearns; in comments regarding the new hire, Paul Deitch, Patch of Land's chief executive officer said, "The addition of Matt enables us to continue the expansion of our marketplace to fully serve the lending needs of more than 10 million Americans who directly invest in single-family residential properties and need consistent, reliable access to capital to fuel their businesses." Source
Wonga offers short-term payday loans and is based in London; company has announced a data breach which may include personal information of 270,000 current and former customers; a majority of their customers affected are UK based, but 25,000 customers in Poland may also be affected; Wonga has recently reduced fees and launched 90-day loans after the Financial Conduct Authority instituted a rate cap and forced lenders to apply for authorization. Source
PayPal will offer loans to larger businesses that process payments with its platform and have access to new firms as a result of the acquisition; Swift Financial was founded in 2006 and extends credit with loans and advances; term loans of up to $500,000 will now be available to businesses; Darrel Esch, vice president and commercial officer of global credit at PayPal, stated, "This is an area where customers have been asking for more."; terms of the deal were not disclosed. Source
PayPal's fourth quarter earnings release revealed a number of interesting developments for the company; the firm has been steadily growing its partnerships with e-commerce businesses which has helped increase the number of payment transactions per customer; in the fourth quarter PayPal reported 31.1 transactions per active customer which was an increase from 30.2 in the previous quarter and 27.5 in the comparable quarter; PayPal's CEO Dan Schulman has also discussed a new partnership with Amazon that would allow Amazon customers to pay for purchases with PayPal which would further support increases in its customer account activity. Source
Marketplace lender, Peerform, has been acquired by Versara Lending; Versara is a New York City-based consumer lender seeking to expand its lending business in consumer loans; Peerform will enhance the lending capabilities for Versara and Peerform Founder Mikael Rapaport will join Versara Lending as a senior vice president. Source
The market has reported the first securitization of Lending Club prime loans, the Arcadia Receivables Credit Trust (ARCT 2017-1); the portfolio has been priced by Jefferies and is backed by $220 million of Lending Club prime loans as collateral; the loans come from Cirrix Capital's marketplace lending fund which is overseen by Arcadia; the securitization has two tranches which have both received a rating from Kroll Bond Rating Agency; tranche A includes the majority of the loans with $176.9 million in collateral and a BBB rating; tranche B includes $36.75 million in loans with a BB- rating; PeerIQ provides further analysis on the portfolio and how it compares to other similar securitization deals. Source
At the SFIG 2017 conference on Monday, PeerIQ announced a new data partnership with 1010data; according to the press release the partnership will now offer the industry's only integrated cloud platform with self-service data management and analytics; users will now have access to even broader capabilities for loan data analysis through 1010data's Insights Platform which includes an analytical function library, pre-defined reports and queries through 1010data QuickApps and the ability to overlay consumer credit and econometric data with marketplace loan data analysis. Source