Prosper tightened its credit underwriting in July resulting in a shift toward lower risk loans; the changes caused a total portfolio coupon decrease of 45 basis points and a return estimate decrease of 26 basis points; reported lower charge-off levels from 2016H2 loans and higher delinquencies from loans issued in 2016 and 2017; C-rated loans accounted for the greatest portion of the total portfolio at 31.54%; estimated weighted average return for the month was 7.75%. Source
Marketplace lending data analytics provider AltFi Data has partnered with Lendix and will incorporate the lender's data on its analytics platform; AltFi Data is a leading performance data provider for the marketplace lending industry providing a single methodology for calculating platform performance across all lenders; its data reporting includes a range of attributes and data points including net returns, benchmark comparisons, originations, lending rates and charge-off rates. Source
Christophe Williams talks with Andy Rachleff, co-founder, president and CEO of Wealthfront; Rachleff is a fintech industry expert with extensive experience investing in and managing tech companies; he is also active in roles at the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his bachelor's degree and at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he earned his MBA; in the podcast he talks about a wide range of topics pertaining to fintech; he also discusses the creation of Wealthfront and its business strategy. Source
Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet has become CFO Marty Chavez's new mentor at Goldman Sachs; the relationship is part of a new initiative that has Goldman Sachs focused on making its services for risk comparable to Google's services for search; the bank wants to be the leading source for trading and managing risks giving its firm the attention of risk managers that Google gets from advertisers; to do this it has created Data Lake, a machine learning platform that manages information on transactions, markets and investment research as well as communication from emails, voice calls and instant messages; the new internal technology system is based on APIs that connect different parts of the business to the Data Lake central database making its communication processes more efficient. Source
ApplePie Capital has built a dynamic marketplace lending platform with a range of high net worth and institutional investors focused on business lending for franchises; Lend Academy talks with ApplePie Capital CEO Denise Thomas in their podcast; the podcast provides in-depth details on platform loan terms for franchisees; Denise Thomas also gives insight into the small business franchise market and talks about recent capital investments for the platform. Source
StreetShares has announced a $10.3 million fundraising; the US marketplace lender specializes in funding business loans to companies managed by veterans; the platform has a range of product offerings with loans issued for $2,000 to $100,000. Source
TechCrunch has published the video from an interview with Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum; in the interview he talked about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, highlighting what makes a good use case for the technology. Source
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne is exploring options to sell the retailer and use the proceeds to start a digital global property registry; Mr. Byrne would be teaming up with Hernando de Soto who says that formalizing land rights can help to stop poverty; they are looking to use the blockchain to list ownership records, this would make it easier to trace them back to the right owner and account for less forgeries; the new company, De Soto, would start in early 2018 and use more than 10 Overstock employees. Source.
Crain's talked with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon this week as he toured the Midwest, meeting with bank employees; Dimon discussed the credit market; also gave his perspective on online lending, noting some of the risks from depending on investor capital versus bank capital. Source
P2P loan originations for Chinese online lender Dianrong more than doubled from 2015 to 2016; the platform reported 2016 originations of 16.2 billion yuan ($2.3 billion) and the firm plans to continue growing its market share as regulations help the success of established P2P lending firms in China; Dianrong's co-founder and co-CEO, Kevin Guo, talked with Reuters about the firm's growth and China's evolving market; says smaller firms will have difficulty staying in business and that Dianrong plans to grow significantly in the near-term with a new funding round and the goal to grow loan originations by 50% annually over the next three to five years. Source