Lending Club announces new features

This week we have been paying a lot of attention to Lending Club's video contest. That's not the only thing going on over at Lending Club. I just received an email announcing two "new" features and notice their blog mentions four others. First, the two from email:

LendingMatch™ and borrowing minimums are now $500
You can now use LendingMatch™ to generate portfolio recommendations with as little as $500. It is necessary to lend at least $500 to use LendingMatch™ because the algorithm tries to allocate your investment into at least 20 fractions of loans, for diversification purposes. Since the minimum investment in each loan is $25, you need at least $500 in total. The minimum amount you can lend without using LendingMatch™ remains unchanged at $25. You will also see smaller loans on the site, as we have reduced the minimum loan amount to $500.

Invite your Facebook friends and earn referral bonuses
You can invite 10 Facebook friends per day (in accordance with Facebook's privacy policy) to Lending Club and you'll receive $5 for each person who becomes a member. Let all of your friends know that you have money to lend them!

LendingMatch is Lending Club's answer to the diversification problem. As Matt mentioned in a previous article, most Prosper lenders do not diversify. Mostly, this is because they do not have enough invested. If you are invested in one loan and it defaults you lose all your money. Diversification is very important.

As I mentioned back in July, Lending Club "quietly launched a referral program." Now they are making it more public via email to lenders and a blog post.

The other four new features mentioned on their blog post are:

• Minimum loan request for borrowers is now $500 instead of $1,000.
  
• The my account area now contains detailed portfolio analysis and individual loan information.
• Adjustments to the expected monthly payment amount to deal with rounding issues.
• Borrowers from Arizona can now request loans.