Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Is Lending Club Getting Sketchy?

Two of the key search items that I have looked at when investing in Lending Club have been the "Verified Income" field and the "Review Status" field. Verified Income is particularly important to me because when gauging the likelihood of repayment, knowing how much a person makes is obviously very valuable information. While not as important, knowing whether a loan is approved already is very helpful--when you decide that you want to buy a note on a particular loan, you want that money to be invested as quickly as possible and not have to wait  for Lending Club to finish its approval process.

Unfortunately, over the last few months, when I have been browsing notes on Lending Club, and I have limited my search by either of those fields, absolutely no notes return.

I might be able to explain away the fact that no notes have been approved by considering that perhaps Lending Club has been inundated with new notes and has therefore pushed back the approval process until after loans secure full funding, but I can't think of a single good reason why loans would not have verified income. While not all applicants had verified income previously, there were still a good number that did, and (to me, at least) it seemed very prudent to give those notes priority attention.

I did some tentative searching but was unable to come up with a reason for these searches coming up blank. One article from April of this year even suggested that we should start seeing more notes with verified incomes.

Fellow Lending Club users: did I miss an announcement of some kind? Why have already approved notes from loans with applicants with verified income disappeared from the Lending Club platform?

Photo by photosteve101

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi - you're not alone. It's not that Lending Club is getting more sketchy. It's that there are more investors snatching up loans, so there's less time for the loans to be verified before they're completely subscribed.

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