Peter Renton of Lend Academy and Andrew Dix from Crowdfund Insider will be doing a question and answer forum discussion on Wednesday, January 18 at 2:00 PM EST; the webinar will be hosted by LendIt, Crowdfund Insider and Orchard Platform; participants can submit questions for the speakers at registration or during the webinar; LendIt will also be hosting a number of webinars leading up to LendIt USA 2017; register today for Marketplace Lending 101 and submit your questions. Source
Sandler O'Neill clients will soon get access to Orchard's suite of data analytics products thanks to a new partnership between the two firms; Lend Academy talked with Orchard to provide more insight on the partnership; clients of Sandler O'Neill include community banks, thrifts and specialty finance institutions; Orchard's Chief Commercial Officer Bill Ullman says the data partnership will provide expertise to help them evaluate investment opportunities in the online lending market. Source
In December the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its proposal for a fintech charter with an open comment period until January 15; the OCC has received numerous comments which can be found here; Lend Academy and LendIt submitted a response in favor of the fintech charter; their response outlines the difficulties online lenders have in complying with different rules in each of the 50 states; suggests nationalization of regulation would make platform operations more efficient and help the industry to broaden the benefits it can offer to financial inclusion and other nationwide initiatives. Source
LendingRobot has announced the launch of a new alternative lending hedge fund; Lend Academy provides details in their article; the new fund will add to the service offerings at LendingRobot which currently include aggregated marketplace lending investment accounts for both retail investors and financial advisors; the new LendingRobot Series fund will invest in online loan origination platforms and offer multiple strategies for investors with expected net returns ranging from 6.86% to 9.66%; the fund is only open to accredited investors and requires a minimum investment of $100,000; it has a 1% management fee with fund expenses of up to 0.59%. Source
As with past conferences LendIt aims to bring new speakers to the conference; this year LendIt has confirmed Ash Gupta (President of American Express), Harit Talwar (CEO of Marcus) and Thomas Curry (Head of the OCC) among many others who are new to LendIt; the agenda will also include the leaders in online lending with representation from companies such as Lending Club, Prosper, OnDeck and loanDepot; the conference will be the largest for the industry to date with a 100,000 square foot exhibit hall, featuring over 200 companies; LendIt will end the conference with the first ever industry awards dinner. Source
The marketplace lending industry has evolved with investments coming from a range of market channels; to help marketplace loans integrate even further into the mainstream the industry needs involvement from 'gatekeepers' and needs to educate the asset allocator community; Lend Academy discusses the investment consultant process to bring new types of investments to asset allocators; to help facilitate this communication, LendIt is offering asset allocators free tickets to LendIt USA 2017 and is planning a special event at the conference for asset allocators, hosted by fund managers. Source
Prospect Capital is a publicly traded business development company investing in marketplace loans; Lend Academy talks with Chris Johnson who runs marketplace lending investments at Prospect Capital Management; Chris talks about the firm's investing strategy and its allocation to marketplace loans which includes Prosper, Avant, Lending Club and OnDeck; Chris also talks about Prospect Capital's involvement with securitization, their investment approach for 2016 and 2017, their new closed-end fund and his perspective on a marketplace lending secondary market. Source
Lend Academy provides a list of the top eight podcasts providing insight on the fintech market; these podcasts can provide a wealth of information on new companies, industry announcements and regulations; Lend Academy lists Breaking Banks as its top fintech podcast; the Breaking Banks podcast is hosted by industry expert Brett King every Thursday at 3:00 PM EST. Source
Motif Investing provides a unique platform for investors interested in investing in stocks based around different themes; Lend Academy interviews Hardeep Walia in their podcast which provides more details on the investment platform; Motif allows investors to build a thematic investment portfolio with low trading costs; it has over 300,000 investors and is also working with institutional clients. Source
Lend Academy provides details on IBM Watson's acquisition of Promontory Financial Group, a firm used to help navigate complex banking regulations; IBM has acquired Promontory to train Watson on Dodd-Frank which includes 22,000 pages of regulation; Promontory has experience from a long list of banking veterans and will help train Watson on financial risk modeling, surveillance, anti-money laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC); the result will be an artificial intelligence solution that can be implemented for all aspects of compliance, regulation and monitoring; Brian Walter, Watson global industry leader for banking and financial markets at IBM will be speaking at LendIt USA 2017 in a featured keynote discussing how financial firms are using artificial intelligence and how it's expected to evolve. Source