-
The billionaire investor George Soros is in talks to throw his support behind the peer-to-peer finance industry, which is increasingly leaning on traditional capital sources to lower its costs of funding.
November 25 -
Online lenders from OnDeck to Lending Club are forming partnerships with traditional financial institutions, prompting some observers to wonder if they might one day be willing to become banks themselves.
November 24 -
As banks struggle to make sense of their wealth of customer information, the burgeoning industry of online marketplace lending is finding novel ways to glean insights from unconventional data points.
November 5
Alternative financier LendingTree launched an online marketplace for small business loans Wednesday.
Small-business lending is seen as a promising area for alternative finance as it evolves beyond peer-to-peer lending. LendingTree already facilitated small-business loans through its online marketplace that funds consumer and other loans; its web portal opened Wednesday exclusively shops small-business loans to individual and institutional investors.
The new marketplace will feature loans from $5,000 to $1 million for businesses deemed creditworthy; approvals could come within 48 hours.
"Real-time online financing is the wave of the future and it will now be available to LendingTree's business client base," Walt Levengood, the chief strategy officer of Merchant Cash and Capital, a lender in LendingTree's network, said in a press release. "This technology will allow LendingTree to facilitate significant funding opportunities without the arduous process and delays associated with traditional business loans."
