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.

The second Carnival of Peer-to-Peer Lending installment was hosted by BripBlap & included the following articles:

RateLadder dispenses some Not So Obvious Tips to Maximize Your Chance of Funding for Prosper borrowers (including neat graphical analysis of factors like listing time, duration, and description length), and also presents updated Prosper vintage curves (late rates, as of 1/1/08).

Pinyo at Moolanomy funds his Second P2P Loan on Prosper and muses about the relative benefits of Prosper’s portfolio plans – plus fends off a comment derailment concerning the ethics of lending & borrowing money (online or off) from someone trying to (wait for it!..) sell a book about the evils of lending & borrowing money (online or off).

Tom of Prosper Lending Review scores an Interview with Chirag Chaman of Fynanz, a new Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending startup that aims to take a bite out of the traditional student loan market. Very interesting to see P2P expanding in this direction, but no word on the most important question that will undoubtedly affect the dynamics of this market and whether it will go beyond just “friends and family”: Will these P2P Student Loans be just like any other unsecured debt and dischargeable in bankruptcy, or can (a much larger market of) lenders expect (and price for) these loans to be federally certified and therefore non-dischargeable?

WiseClerk channels Nostradamus and makes some predictions about the P2P Lending space in 2008. No quatrains, sadly, but still some interesting ideas regarding possible insurance products and Peer-to-Peer market expansions.

Brett at PersonalLoanPortfolio wonders Why Lending Club Denies Most Loans. This is a very interesting question, and one that I’ve asked Lending Club about in the recent past. Rob from Lending Club stops by to assure lenders that loans which are not old enough to have a payment due will no longer be included in performance calculations, as well as to explain why Lending Club has only accepted about 11% of borrower applications thus far, citing a committment to marketplace safety – though I do have to wonder if the extremity of that figure doesn’t have more to do with Lending Club’s palpable lack of guidance in the borrowing process.

DoughRoller Overcomes His Fear and Lends on Prosper.com through a process of reasoned analysis and a commitment to go slowly, and decides that Portfolio Plans will make his investing much less emotion-based. We’ll check back with him after his Portfolio Plan bids with no compunction on a listing whose text includes the word “desperate” (grossly misspelled).

Hey Prosper Lenders! Question from a Borrower.. from Amanda @ Me vs Debt, wonders aloud how lenders feel about the availability of additional loans within the Prosper marketplace. (My advice is to disclose it in your listing – since Prosper discloses it anyway! – and let the bids fall where they may.)

Rounding out the pack, MoneySmartLife offers an Overview of P2P Lending.

That wraps up the 2nd Carnival of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending – anyone want to try to knock over some bowling pins? Just $1 a ball!