What We Do
Company background
Lending Club is a social lending network where members can borrow and lend money among themselves at better rates.
Why is online person-to-person or social lending the next big thing?
Person-to-person lending has been documented as far back as 5,000 B.C. when people loaned grain to other people. The borrowed grain was repaid (often with interest) at harvest time. Money may not have been invented for another two thousand years, but it certainly made things easier. But where do you store your money? Well, banks came around a couple of thousand years after that as people needed to find a trusted third party to keep all that money. Now, there are around 70,000 bank branches in the United States alone (we have no plans to make that 70,001).
So, social lending is nothing new. We actually think it takes us back to the way things used to be: both lender and borrower are known to their given communities; the borrower had a credit history (the lender would know how many fields the borrower could plant); and, they would both have a mechanism to exchange the grain (a basket to carry the grain).
Lending Club provides a much improved infrastructure for social lending: state-of-the-art technology to authenticate all users (ensuring making sure they are who they say they are); credit scoring systems which rate borrower risk; and, the automated clearing house (ACH) system to move the funds between both parties. In addition, we provide our LendingMatch™ system to minimize risk and allow community based lending.
So, while social lending is not new, we think our take on it is. Better rates by moving the lending process online and avoiding the cost structure and complexity facing banks and credit card companies.
Lending Club. Better rates. Together.
