LendingClub is a US peer-to-peer lending company, headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was the first peer-to-peer lender to register its offerings as securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and to offer loan trading on a secondary market. Lending Club is the world's largest peer-to-peer lending platform. The company claims that $15.98 billion in loans had been originated through its platform up to December 31, 2015.Lending Club enables borrowers to create unsecured personal loans between $1,000 and $40,000. The standard loan period is three years. Investors can search and browse the loan listings on Lending Club website and select loans that they want to invest in based on the information supplied about the borrower, amount of loan, loan grade, and loan purpose. Investors make money from interest. Lending Club makes money by charging borrowers an origination fee and investors a service fee.
Lending Club also makes traditional direct to consumer loans, including automobile refinance transactions, through WebBank, an FDIC-insured, state-chartered industrial bank that is headquartered in Salt Lake City Utah. The loans are not funded by investors but are assigned to other financial institutions.
The company raised $1 billion in what became the largest technology IPO of 2014 in the United States. Though viewed as a pioneer in the fintech industry and one of the largest such firms, Lending Club experienced problems in early 2016, with difficulties in attracting investors, a scandal over some of the firm's loans and concerns by the board over CEO Renaud Laplanche's disclosures leading to a large drop in its share price and Laplanche's resignation.