Lending Club getting Owned

[JohnnyP]

Has anybody read this article? It seems like Lending Club as company has many uphill battles. I find it hard to see the positives.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4083106-lending-club-take-look-competition?page=3

[Debt Free]

Yep, read that a couple days ago.  Not the new kid in town anymore.

[nonattender]

Lots of uptick in negative press, lately - all following from those out of the blue "online lenders don't verify 100% of loans" stories.  If I were a cynic who didn't believe in coincidence, I'd probably be tempted to think that someone out there has "an agenda".  And yet, LendingClub just reported a ~$300mm, ~4x over-subscribed securitization deal with a bunch of new institutions clammering to get in...

We'll see.

[Rob L]

There was a link in the article that said:
"That's eleven online, unsecured personal loan providers. The list does not include some others, like SoFi and Lightstream. Try it yourself here."
So,I did. Per the article I left the amount requested at $10,000 and FICO at 700-749 but there are a couple of other parameter choices to be made). These were Term and Purpose (Save on Credit Card Debt, Compare New Personal Loans, and Refinance An Existing Loan). The default was Compare New Personal Loans so I chose that. I selected 36-47 months for Term.

Lending Club always appears at the top of the list ("Featured Personal Loan" i.e. Sponsored Ad). There were 6 companies offering loans with the selection criteria I provided:

Company       est APR
----------      ---------
Marcus           10.99%
LC                  11.15%
Freedom+      11.26%
Avant             11.95%
Payoff             14.00%
OneMain         24.99%

I changed the FICO to 639 or less, 640-699, 700-749 and finally 750-850.
Guess what; none of the interest rates displayed above changed.

What gives? Then I noticed at the top right ("Not ...login name...?? then log in").
The last Credit Karma login on the computer I was using was my by my daughter and her login name was shown. I logged in and out of CK with my own credentials then retried the procedure above. Now my login name was displayed. Much different results as my FICO is a bit higher than my daughter's. So, if the author of the article happened to be a CK user then their own personal data was used to generate the list of offers.

[nonattender]

You get a cookie for knowing to clear your cookies.

[fliphusker]

CreditKarma is a personal finance website. They provide a list of online personal loan options, given some basic information. I put in $10,000 as my desired loan amount and selected a credit score of 700-749. I got the following list of offers:

I quit reading there after his very scientific approach. Not sure who on this board told me about how unreliable Seeking Alpha is, but I always read everything from them with a grain of salt.
From my limited time of writing stupid football articles, any writer that is half-assed at least, can write an article skewed to whatever direction they desire. Seeking Alpha is one of those sites with half ass writers.

[Rob L]

For the Credit Karma "comparison" to be of any value it should provide a range of est loan APR's rather than a single number (given only Fico, Term, and Purpose). Of course even then the ranges may be so wide as to be useless. The best thing it does is give potential borrowers a list of online lenders to evaluate.