-
Like General Motors extending credit to car dealers, Google will use Lending Club to finance resellers, service providers, and consultants in its supply chain while putting to work a portion of the tech giant's cash war chest.
January 26 -
Once known as peer-to-peer, online marketplace lending grew phenomenally and evolved rapidly in 2014, as capital flooded in from institutional investors and traditional bankers sat up and took notice.
December 17
Lending analytics firm Orchard Platform has cut a deal with alternative small-business lender Kabbage to allow institutions to invest in the latter's relatively new line of consumer loans.
It's a small step toward a grander vision, shared by many in the field, of a major secondary market for nonmortgage personal and small business debt, powered by data and analytics that give investors granular transparency on every loan.
The personal loans, which Kabbage introduced in September, are unsecured and can run up to $35,000 with 36-to-60-month paybacks. As a platform for institutional investors to invest in loans the way individual accredited investors do on marketplace lending platforms, Orchard will provide data to its financial institution clients to facilitate purchases of loan packages.
"Investors on Orchard can now analyze data, invest in [Kabbage's consumer] loans in a data-driven way, and manage their portfolio through a unified product that provides visibility into all their marketplace investments," Orchard's co-founder and chief product officer David Snitkof said in a press release.
