P2P Lending & P2P Loans

Last week, peer-to-peer lending provider Lending Club began offering data exports containing a variety of information from their peer-to-peer lending platform/marketplace, including: data for loans that have funded to date, loans whose listings are currently active, and loans which were rejected for not meeting Lending Club’s strict credit qualifications (minimum 640 FICO, with no current delinquencies). On the heels of this release, the first independent third-party statistics site was launched to report and analyze Lending Club’s listing and loan data.

LendingClubStats.com features easy to read charts and analyses of LC’s loan data exports and also includes functionality that offers the ability to more quickly browse through active loans, as well as to sort loans by minimum interest rate and by loan amount. The site is administered by the developer of Eric’s Credit Community, one of the first statistics sites devoted to another P2P lending site, Prosper.com, which launched in early 2006. (For those who wish to slice and dice the loan data on their own, the exports are directly available from Lending Club in both CSV (comma delimited) and XML formats.)

Lending Club’s provision of marketplace data marks an important milestone in their development as a transparent peer to peer lending & loan platform. Lending Club’s main competitor, Prosper.com, the first-mover in the US P2P lending space, has offered comprehensive data downloads of all of its marketplace activity since mid-2006. A budding ecosystem of third-party statistics and analysis sites (as well as other clever uses of the data, such as “fantasy” market simulations) have grown up around Prosper’s efforts at P2P marketplace transparency, and, hopefully, this will be the beginning of a similar process around Lending Club’s efforts at same.

A collection of peer-to-peer lending tools, including links to the Lending Club statistics mentioned in this article (as well as links to the entire Prosper.com third-party ecosystem) are available on Peer-Lend’s P2P Lending Tools page.