Australian P2P commercial property marketplace lender LendEx has appointed two new board members to its board of directors; Brian Benger will join the board with experience from consulting firm Mercer; credit market executive Kim Jenkins will also join the board; Jenkins is currently the CEO of the Australian Retail Credit Association; Benger and Jenkins join Robert Hines, the firm's chairman, as the board's non-executive directors. Source
SMB lender Lendflow announced a partnership with Ocrolus to determine borrowers' viability and provide critical access to capital.
LendFoundry has developed a full operating system for marketplace lenders, banks and credit unions to provide online loans; Roger Vogel the firm's CEO talks about the operating system and how the business is evolving; also reports on the wide range of capabilities that the operating system offers including its APIs and services for compliance, loan originations and loan management. Source
LendFoundry has enhanced its lending operating system (LOS); the LOS can now support loan processing and management for point of sale, auto loans, working capital loans and unsecured consumer loans; it also offers one of the industry's best suite of APIs for connecting with industry fintech companies including Clarity Services, Whitepages Pro, FEDChex, Yodlee, Towerdata, Twilio, Plaid, LOB and more; the platform has significantly expanded its API offerings to allow for increased integration across the industry; Brent Fausett, senior vice president and chief commercial officer at LendFoundry says: "Our product development team has built 50+ pre-configured APIs. We will continue on our vision and keep adding new APIs as we believe that a pre-integrated platform places lenders miles ahead of the competition." Source
LendGenius is launching a new product to offer loan options for small businesses and to help increase education and awareness of small business credit availability; the company plans to launch its service in April 2017; the service will feature a dashboard of available loan offerings for companies based on their application profile; LendGenius has also worked extensively on building out the lender integration with the system which provides a range of API integrations and a comprehensive dashboard for reviewing borrowers; in the past four months the company reports over 30,000 requests for capital totaling over $8 million. Source
According to P2P-Banking, Lendico has stopped originating consumer loans in Germany; website is referring consumer loan borrowers to Finanzcheck, but the company is still offering business loans in Germany; company has also ended consumer loans in the Netherlands and stopped new loan originations in Brazil and South Africa; recent activity from the firm includes an announcement last week regarding a joint venture with Postfinance in Switzerland. Source
Scott Sanborn discussed the current market environment for online lending in his speech at LendIt USA comparing the industry to the growth of online retail and using Amazon as an example for how businesses can dramatically change and adapt to provide the best services for market needs; online lenders will have to be strategic in identifying market opportunities, building on their proprietary systems and partnering with other companies; Ash Gupta from American Express also noted at the conference the challenges and opportunities presented to online lending through the use of big data; the growing amount of data sourced by the industry has the potential to improve credit models and fraud prevention while also providing broader capabilities through machine learning technology. Source
A federal district court in the Southern District of New York has ordered the Bethune v. Lending Club Corporation, et al. case to proceed to arbitration; plaintiffs argue that Lending Club loans were in violation of state usury laws despite their association with WebBank; while the case is still pending, the court has said it will be decided through arbitration due to clauses in place by Lending Club. Source
John MacIlwaine has taken a new role as chief technology officer at Braintree; Braintree is a mobile payments technology company owned by PayPal; MacIlwaine submitted his resignation at Lending Club in December. Source
Lending Club borrowers are given a 15 day grace period for loan payments; borrowers are not assessed a late fee and previously did not pay accrued interest on the overdue amount; Lending Club has revised its grace period policy as of February 24 to require borrowers to now pay additional interest on the late payments; the firm will continue to not charge a late fee until after the 15 day grace period. Source