Blogging for Lending Club

I'm happy to announce I have joined the blogging team at Lending Club. Read my first post here:

Gambling Away Wealth

Four months ago Matt and I started this blog to share our fascination with peer to peer lending. It’s been an exciting time and a great learning experience. When we started the blog in late June we thought it would be a blog strictly about Prosper. That explains the current title - Prosper Lending Review.

At first we didn’t realize the explosive growth in the peer to peer lending community. A new peer to peer start-up, Lending Club, was only a couple weeks old. Our first post about Lending Club announced they had just passed the $100,000 mark in loans.

Lending Club has quickly become a popular topic on this blog. We covered their video contest extensively. The most enjoyable posts for me were these interviews with contestants in the contest:

• Rock star calls peer to peer lending ‘anarchy in its finest form’
• 18-year-old leads in Lending Club’s video contest
• Comedian uses ‘guerrilla marketing’ to promote Lending Club video
• Lending Club’s Battle at Kruger
• Chris Barrett shoots commercial for Lending Club’s video contest
• Lending Club awards $8,000 in YouTube video contest – includes interview with CEO Renaud Laplanche

In addition to the video contest, we announced milestones and news such as their expansion beyond Facebook, new features and a $10 million dollar infusion of venture capital. Sometimes I have been critical of Lending Club like when I (accurately) predicted they would have problems using page views as a metric in their video contest or when I (inaccurately) complained that TechCrunch seemed to favor Lending Club over Prosper (on this more recent TechCrunch post about Prosper and P2P lending they don't even mention Lending Club).

All in all, I have been very impressed with Lending Club and their team. They have done a great job of engaging their community and have grown rapidly. I’m impressed how they used the buzz around Facebook to publicize their launch. I’m equally impressed with how quickly they launched beyond Facebook. Too often peer to peer lending users have to wait longer than expected to see announcements come to fruition (think Zopa’s launch in the USA, Globefunder’s missed launch date, Loanio’s unknown launch date, numerous Prosper controversies, and slow state-by-state expansion). I know that Lending Club is not exempt from the regulatory and other hurdles that stymie peer to peer lending but it was refreshing to see a launch outside of Facebook so soon.

Although I haven’t actually met any Lending Club employees, I’ve interacted with Renaud Laplanche, Rex Dixon, Merry Richter and Patrick Gannon on Facebook, their blog, and via email. They have a top notch team and I’m excited to work with them. I look forward to getting to know more of their other 20+ employees.

They also have a great blogging team – DebtKid, Mike Smith, Maneesh Sethi, Andre Nosalsky and Julian Ramirez. Back in July I made these comments as I reviewed Lending Club’s blog:

“Lending Club is challenging Prosper to become the leading peer to peer loan marketplace in the United States. They have been online since May 26th - just six weeks. I have not signed up as a lender or borrower yet, but I've been watching their blog pretty close. I've been very impressed with their communication with their community through the blog. Of course they have the normal things you would expect on a corporate blog such as Lending Club announcements, but they also make a genuine effort to educate users on sound financial principles (mostly the perils of credit card debt). The posts are not overly technical or complicated. Most seem to be written for the average college age person. Someone who might be applying for their first credit card or taking out their first loan.”

My posts on Lending Club will be similar and cover mostly personal finance topics. Will this blog (Prosper Lending Review) change? Well, to be honest, I’ve been pretty busy. I have a full time day job that includes lots of travel and sometimes my blogging time is very limited. As regular readers have probably noticed, our posts have dropped from a daily in July and August to weekly or less recently. Splitting my time between this blog and Lending Club will likely further reduce the frequency of posts. I will, however, continue to write about P2P lending here. I realize that my position as a blogger for Lending Club may introduce a natural bias to my writing. I will fully disclose my position as a Lending Club blogger on all future posts.

I think it’s appropriate to end with a quote from my new blogging boss – Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche. As competition in the peer to peer lending market is heating up and several new companies are poised to enter the market he told CenterNetworks, "Prosper is really the only other person-to-person lending marketplace available in the US at this point, but we do not feel competitive with them at all. Both Prosper and Lending Club can be very successful, and the success of both companies will be much more dependent on how fast we can grow the p2p lending space together rather than how well we compete against each other. With 2.4 trillion dollar in personal consumer debt (other than mortgages), it is a big market out there."

I think he is right. The potential market in the P2P lending space is huge. Hopefully my participation in Lending Club’s blog will help grow that space.

Read my Lending Club posts here and subscribe.