P2P-Banking has released its monthly report on loan originations; Funding Circle led originations for the month at 106.1 million euros, also reporting a new monthly high; Zopa and Ratesetter also topped the list; Zopa reported monthly loan originations of 85.3 million euros and Ratesetter had loan originations of 63.9 million euros. Source
SoFi is becoming one of the US's largest and most comprehensive marketplace lenders. Since launching in 2011 they have originated over $15 billion in loans. They market themselves as a new kind of finance company and recently acquired Zenbanx, expanding their products to deposit accounts. SoFi also offers student loan refinancing, mortgage loans, personal loans, wealth management and life insurance.
In Lend Academy's recent podcast with SoFi, CEO Mike Cagney provides some insight on how the company might be valued on a per customer basis. Mike Cagney says larger banks are valued at approximately $10,000 to $100,000 per customer. SoFi currently expects to have 500,000 customers by the end of 2017 and 2 million customers in the next two to three years; at a value of $50,000 per SoFi customer, this would imply a $100 billion valuation. Source
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) had a heightened presence in 2016; it was involved in governance for payday lending and marketplace lenders, it also declared a $100 million fine for Wells Fargo and was declared unconstitutional by a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court; the CFPB's structure and authority will be a factor for 2017; a marketplace lending retrenchment in 2016 also included a number of new lessons centered around governance and alternative forms of platform investment; decreased confidence and increasing platform defaults will be factors to watch for marketplace lending in 2017 while increasing credit defaults overall, and specifically in auto loans, could also be influential. Source
Urjanet has raised $20 million in new financing for its utility focused data services business; the firm tracks utility data from 4,000 utilities in 30 countries and plans to expand its data services for utility payments to lenders seeking alternative credit data; investors in the recent funding round included Oak HC/FT, Grotech Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Imlay Investments and the Georgia Research Alliance. Source
Fundrise began its crowdfunded initial public offering (IPO) on February 1; the investment has been oversubscribed and the company has paused the offering due to high demand; it has reported it will increase the available shares to three million from two million; in an updated offering circular the firm says it will offer three million shares at a price of $5.00 which brings the total expected fundraising to $15 million. Source
MoneyLion provides customers with a range of services for managing their finances and also includes credit products; the platform incorporates a unique rewards program that can help customers receive loan discounts and rewards from endorsements and on-time payments; company is a featured applicant in the 2017 Benzinga Global Fintech Awards competition; led by co-founders Dee Choubey, Chee Mun Foong and Pratyush Tiwari, the company raised $650 million in debt financing in September 2016 and $22.5 million in a Series A equity funding round in December 2016. Source
LendIt's Jason Jones writes about the marketplace lending opportunity for bank partnerships in a Lend Academy article; in 2016, many marketplace lenders reported partnerships with banks, exemplifying this new opportunity; three main types of partnerships have been prevalent including bank-fintech-bank (BFB), fintech-fintech-bank (FFB) and bank-fintech-fintech (BFF); co-branding or white labeling has also been a factor in the partnerships; some traditional banks have chosen to take the full cost of developing their own online lending platform including, Goldman Sachs and PingAn, however many banks are finding partnerships more cost efficient; LendIt's bank partnerships webinar on Wednesday will highlight this trend. Source
John Battelle, founder of Newco, talks with SoFi's Mike Cagney about the firm and its business growth; Cagney talks about the firm's customer commitment and the support customers receive over traditional banks; also reports on the verticals it has expanded to since starting the business with student loans; additionally Cagney provides some metrics on the business including that the company has $1 billion in equity on its balance sheet, $6 billion of lending capacity, $9.5 billion in loans for 2017 and estimates $18 to $20 billion in loan originations for 2018. Source
At the SFIG 2017 conference on Monday, PeerIQ announced a new data partnership with 1010data; according to the press release the partnership will now offer the industry's only integrated cloud platform with self-service data management and analytics; users will now have access to even broader capabilities for loan data analysis through 1010data's Insights Platform which includes an analytical function library, pre-defined reports and queries through 1010data QuickApps and the ability to overlay consumer credit and econometric data with marketplace loan data analysis. Source
A member of the Lend Academy forum has created a table sharing the annualized rate of return on 36 month loans based on differing charge off scenarios; the table outlines when returns will become negative at varying interest rates which can in turn be compared to interest rates on loans issued by Lending Club; the findings are valuable to investors who are interested in knowing what might happen to their portfolio if defaults were to increase. Source