Insurtech startup Lemonade announced “We’re opening up the Lemonade platform to the world!” says Shai Wininger, co-founder of Lemonade; the new open API will allow Lemonade to be seamlessly integrated with commerce websites, financial advisor apps, property management companies, payment software processors, IoT [internet of things] platforms and more as Banking Technology reports. Source.
Lemonade has raised $34 million in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst; the Series B round brings the total funding to $60 million; the company plans to use the funding for state expansion with California as its next target. Source
In this guest post Alexander Prokhorov from FinSight Ventures shares what trends his firm is focused on in 2018. Source
Peter Renton from Lend Academy reflects on the news from SoFi last week which involved sexual harassment at the company; Renton shares his perspective on this problem, which is not specific to any one company or any one industry; there are many recent examples of women who are starting to speak out about inappropriate treatment and the negative behavior is starting to have real consequences. Source
There have been a number of new funding deals closed in recent weeks and CB Insights reported that 278 fintech financing deals were done in the third quarter; Lend Academy provides the interesting mix of companies that have raised debt and equity capital. Source
ApplePie Capital has received endorsement from Fifth Third Bancorp as more large banks take an interest in marketplace lenders; Fifth Third Bancorp participated in a funding round that resulted in a $16.5 million investment for ApplePie Capital; Lend Academy provides details in their article; the funding will help ApplePie Capital continue to improve its market positioning; it currently provides loans for franchisees affiliated with its 40 franchise brand partnerships. Source
Lend Academy provides more details on defaults triggering a breach in a SoFi securitization portfolio; the portfolio reporting the defaults was SoFi's first securitization of unsecured consumer loans, the SoFi Consumer Loan Program 2015-1 LLC; given the terms of the deal and the overall characteristics, the breach does not seem to have broad market indications; the deal arrangers set the trigger level at 3% which is a relatively low rate and the cumulative net loss is only reported to be marginally above the trigger; a chart from PeerIQ also provides more details on the cumulative net loss rates for SoFi. Source
The LendIt Rewind podcast has audio of all the sessions from LendIt Fintech USA 2018 conveniently published in a podcast...
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