How can Lending Club improve?

[WES]

Peter,

Would we able to get a Lending Club rep on this forum, to take suggestions for improvement? Glenn's participation on behalf of Prosper has made their site much more user-friendly. I've got a couple of suggestions for Lending Club, and I'm sure others do, too.

[Peter]

I am actually flying to San Francisco this week for meetings with Lending Club and Prosper. I will be mentioning to Lending Club that I would like some participation from them. Rob Garcia often participated but he left LC several months ago and no one has really stepped in to take his place as far as participation goes.

[investorjunkie]

My two beefs with Lending Club:
- The secondary market
- Collections process by Lending Club seems weak at best.

[Peter]

WES, Unfortunately, we won't be seeing much participation from LC on this forum. Their legal department would prefer they not make comments on a public forum such as this, so any questions you have can go through me or you can contact them yourself directly. But please share your knowledge here - others investors appreciate it.

Investorjunkie, The secondary market is still very challenging for investors, but there is some enterprising work being done by Michael at Nickel Steamroller. When he gets done you should be able to invest in the Secondary market much more easily. Check out the LC secondary market portal for more: http://nickelsteamroller.com/lendingclub_market

[Newlyfrugal]

It would be nice if LC gave us the option to "hide" a listing that we reviewed and are not interested in.   After I set my filters, I look at some listings for loans.  I can weed out the ones I don't like, but can't "hide" them from the list of filtered loans.  I don't want to keep reading the same listing again and again.

[Peter]

You are not the first person to request this. Lending Club has done very little in the way of enhancements to their retail site as far as the user interface goes but I have been told it is coming.

I am going to have a blog post dealing with this issue coming up shortly.

[Newlyfrugal]

Why does it take four days to transfer funds from my bank account to my LC account? 

It takes only a day or two for money to get to my brokerage accounts and to my online savings accounts.

It would be great if LC could make my cash available in less than four days.

[Peter]

I have no idea why Lending Club takes so long to fund your account, there should be no reason it should take longer than a brokerage account. Their arch rival Prosper has taken advantage of this and allow instant transfer of funds up to $50K.

[DiligentiaLLC]

I count the "Instant Transfer" feature as one of the main advantages their platform has over LC.  I don't know why LC hasn't caught up yet...

Notice I said "one of the main advantages" and not "the biggest advantage".  Anybody want to take a guess on the biggest advantage Prosper has over LC?   (as if we don't harp about it enough already)     

I have no idea why Lending Club takes so long to fund your account, there should be no reason it should take longer than a brokerage account. Their arch rival Prosper has taken advantage of this and allow instant transfer of funds up to $50K.

[Peter]

I agree that the instant transfer is a nice advantage at Prosper. In case casual observers are wondering what DiligentiaLLC is referring to I am guessing he is talking about ROI. Right now, Prosper has a considerable edge as far as the average return investors are received. You just need to look at Lendstats.com to confirm this. Am I right, Chris?

[DiligentiaLLC]

Good guess Peter, but I was speaking of the ever popular "When will LC ever offer past payment data on repeat borrowers wishing to obtain a new loan?"

Understanding that this is a very small market for Lending Club doesn't reduce the fact it is valuable data for future investments.

[Peter]

Thanks for clearing that up. I will keep mentioning it to them when I speak with them. It is such an easy thing for them to implement that I can't see much argument against putting in a flag for repeat borrowers. We see them all the time in the title and description fields but there is no way to easily filter for these loans. Yet.

[DiligentiaLLC]

I try not to become a conspiracy theorist on the matter but I am beginning to wonder if LC is not doing it on purpose. Perhaps to keep this niche market for their Prime funds or equivalent?   

[Peter]

I very much doubt they are "keeping" these loans for themselves. From my conversations it seems that Lending Club doesn't feel there is enough repeat borrowers to warrant any special consideration. But I will keep hammering away at them on this issue. If there is a deeper reason that they are not saying I think they may want to maintain a sense of differentiation from Prosper which might explain them dragging their feet on this issue.

[rajuabju]

Peter...

any chance you can talk /w the people @ LC and tell them they need to make a deal /w Intuit to allow for automatic updating of data into Quicken?