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Tag: p2p

The End

The End

Is this the end? Are you my friend?
It seems to me, you ought to be free.
You used to be mine when the chips were down.
You used to be mine when I weren’t around…
The Doors.

Those immortal lyrics spring to mind courtesy of this Citi survey of investors:

I’ve been surprised by the suddenness with which markets appear to have shifted gears from an apparent six-year reliance on easy monetary policy to pinning their hopes on the expectation of fiscal stimulus that is still far from materializing. We’ve touched on it in our various coverage at Bloomberg but it seems this will be the theme to watch in 2017. How rapid is the tightening? How pervasive? And, crucially, can the market remain relatively resilient in the face of rising rates and investors who still have a massive long position on credit?

Speaking of which, as is becoming tradition around here, here’s this year’s list of credit coverage. You’ll notice it peters out as the year goes by. That’s because I got busy with a new home and some new work. See you in the new year and here’s hoping your 2017 be filled with all the right kind of surprises.

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Peer-to-Fear

Peer-to-Fear

In January of this year I resurfaced some of my older reporting on the peer-to-peer, or marketplace, lending industry and wrote this line in the first article about Lending Club raising interest rates for the riskiest borrowers on its platform:

It’s worth recalling the words of some investors at the time who criticized LendingClub’s lofty $8.9 billion valuation—reached partly because of overwhelming enthusiasm for all things tech-related.  “These companies are really specialty finance companies, but look at where specialty finance companies trade in the public markets,” said one major marketplace lending investor at the time [of LendingClub’s late 2014 IPO].

It’s a point that, like much of my coverage, has been oft-repeated since – especially in the wake of recent news that Renaud Laplanche, LendingClub’s CEO, resigned following allegations of internal control issues and a rather sloppy ABS deal with Jefferies. My interest in marketplace lending has always been its overlap with traditional finance and the degree to which – as I’ve often written – the disruptive sector has been  co-opted by the very thing it sought to disrupt. In fact, one of the earliest enterprise pieces I wrote on the nascent industry, from January 2013, included the following gems:

“The one thing about peer-to-peer lending is it’s still a relatively manual process. This business needs a lot of scale to be profitable,” said a P2P analyst.

“In order to grow this business one must really have made relationships on the institutional side,” said a P2P CEO.

“On the surface it really almost comes across as too good to be true,” said a P2P institutional investor.

More than three years later and the pressures of scaling a ‘technology’ business that still relies on direct mail for advertising, and which derives much of its value from avoiding the legacy costs (including regulation) of traditional banks, seems to have come to a head viz LendingClub’s apparently lax internal controls, funding and securitization processes.

For those interested, here’s my more recent coverage of the industry’s travails.

When credit market concerns arrive at the marketplace lenders, January 2016 – Recall that the bear case for marketplace lenders was always a turning of the credit cycle that would either produce a rise in borrower defaults or result in a dearth of funding as skittish investors cut their lending on the platform. At the beginning of this year, credit markets spasmed,and LendingClub raised rates on lower-quality loans on its platform by about 67bps as it sought to better compensate nervous investors.

More trouble in bonds backed by peer-to-peer loans, March 2016 – A rating agency slapping a credit rating on a securitization only to downgrade it eight weeks later because of faster-than-expected-delinquencies seems … reminiscent of something.

A new class action suit wants to treat peer-to-peer lenders like mobsters, April 2016 – A scoop about a class action suit that strikes at the heart of the marketplace lending model and came on top of the already troublesome Madden vs Midland Funding decision, completed the ‘doomsday duo’ of funding concerns and regulatory scrutiny for the industry.

LendingClub is turning out to be anything but a direct lender, May 2016 – The resignation of Laplanche sent LendingClub shares plunging and, more significantly, exposed one of the biggest oddities at the center of the company’s business model. While promising to democratize finance by using new technology to directly match borrowers with lenders, LendingClub has turned to a complicated network of middlemen and professional investors to fund its rapid expansion and disintermediate traditional banks.

And the latest edition of our Odd Lots podcast, which sums up some of my thoughts on the matter:

https://soundcloud.com/bloomberg-business/28-how-finances-hot-new-thing-ended-up-in-an-old-school-scandal

The year in credit

The year in credit

Credit markets, I wrote a lot about them this year. One day some other asset class will grab my attention but for the time being it’s this. Sorry.

Here’s what I wrote about the market in 2015 – or at least, since starting the new gig over at Bloomberg in April. I may have missed a few here and there (and included some fixed income posts that I think are related to over-arching credit themes), but I think this is pretty much covers it.

Happy holidays, and may 2016 be filled with just the right amount of yield.

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Big data, finance and inequality

Big data, finance and inequality

… Financial companies have the option of using data-guzzling technologies that make the observation of shopping habits look downright primitive. A plethora of information gathered from social media, digital data brokers and online trails can be used to mathematically determine the creditworthiness of individuals, or to market products specifically targeted to them.

The degree to which such algorithms are utilised by mainstream banks and credit card companies is unclear, as are their inputs, calculations and the resulting scores. While many types of data-driven algorithms have been criticised for opacity and intrusiveness, the use of digital scorecards in finance raises additional issues of fairness. Using such information to make predictions about borrowers can, critics say, become self-fulfilling, hardening the lines between the wealthy and poor by denying credit to those who are already associated with not having access to it.

“You can get in a death spiral simply by making one wrong move, when algorithms amplify a bad data point and cause cascading effects,” says Frank Pasquale, a professor of law at University of Maryland and author of a book on algorithms called The Black Box Society.

I’ve said before that I am incredibly proud of this Financial Times piece exploring the impact of big data on finance and equality. Researching this kind of topic is challenging because details on the use of big data remain murky – even more so when it comes to banks and financial companies. For that reason, much of the discussion remains theoretical, although it’s hard not to believe that this is the direction we are heading when you read that Google – a company notorious for using big data to personalise ads and search engine results in the name of advertising dollars- is now trialling money transfers. The British bank Barclays has reportedly also begun selling aggregated customer data to third-party companies.

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What’s in a name? How peer-to-peer became marketplace lending

What’s in a name? How peer-to-peer became marketplace lending

I’ve written repeatedly about how peer-to-peer lending – the cuddly industry that began with the aim of disintermediating big banks by directly connecting individual borrowers with lenders – has been co-opted by the very industry it once set out to disrupt. As the industry grew and became more entwined with existing financial infrastructure, P2P lenders made a conscious decision to move away from the outdated “peer-to-peer” name.

Ever wonder how that happened? Here’s the story.

The future of the US peer-to-peer lending industry was decided in a luxurious San Francisco hotel on a spring evening last year.

On the sidelines of an alternative-lending conference, the heads of some of the biggest companies in the “P2P” space met privately to discuss rebranding the sector.

Eyeing the success of Uber and Airbnb — tech groups that have created digital marketplaces for car rides and rooms — they agreed to drop the peer-to-peer name in favour of “marketplace lending”.

In investor materials released over the following months by Lending Club, the biggest US P2P lender, as it prepared for its $5bn initial public offering, the phrase “peer-to-peer” did not appear once.

Democratising finance: P2P lenders rebrand and evolve

Here’s looking at you Lending Club

Here’s looking at you Lending Club

Two years ago I took an interest in an up-and-coming fintech company called Lending Club.

Today they listed on the New York Stock Exchange, achieving an astounding valuation of $8.9bn in the process.

Here are a few stories that illustrate how we got from San Francisco start-up to NYSE listing.

The New York Stock Exchange on Lending Club listing day
The New York Stock Exchange on Lending Club listing day

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