Orchard's Weekly Online Lending Snapshot reports on an active week for online lending which began with the SEC's Fintech Forum and included industry news from Prosper, Renaud Laplanche and Zopa; Orchard also mentions the industry's four securitizations announced this week to be reaching default triggers and an industry wide increase in charge-offs overall in older, higher risk loan grades; highlights from the Snapshot's data indicators include a 23.42% increase in Lending Club's stock and a positive month of returns from all US publicly traded companies, lower monthly return for all UK listed marketplace lending funds with the VPC Specialty Lending Fund leading monthly losses with a return of -12.42%, and newly added River North Marketplace Lending Fund reporting a monthly increase of 0.83%. Source
Orchard provides insight on monthly trends in P2P lending originations; uses Lending Club's publicly available standard program data for the analysis; finds October has historically been the peak month for P2P loan originations; identifies loan purpose trends for 2015 with debt consolidation notably highest in January; categories with peak lending originations in December in 2015 included major purchase, other and small business. Source
Orchard has updated its US Consumer Online Loan Index; constituents providing data for the Index have increased to five; new methodologies pertaining to estimates and delinquencies have also been incorporated to improve the Index’s reporting; the updates increase the credibility of the Index as a performance benchmark for the marketplace lending industry; Bill Ullman, Orchard’s chief commercial officer, provides some additional details on the Index’s updates and an analysis of its performance in a blog post. Source
Emerging online lending platforms from traditional banks could be the market's disruptors with their ability to offer low fees; few banks have emerged with proprietary online lending platforms however the fee structures offered by Marcus from Goldman Sachs have caused some industry participants to fear the emergence of similar models; other speculators believe traditional banks are not agile enough to build and offer market leading online lending capabilities in a competitive timeframe; Orchard says competition will be fierce but the end result is likely to produce improved and expanded access to capital for customers. Source
Orchard provides insight on its Q4 2016 originations report which shows total originations of $2.1 billion; data for the Orchard report only includes originators on the platforms that have allowed their data to be shared publicly; from the report, Orchard shows an increase of 10% in originations from the previous quarter which is the first increase since Q4 2015; charge-offs appear to be trending slightly higher in 2014 and 2015 than in previous years which is likely a factor of the entrance of more subprime lenders and could also be the result of broadening credit models; the data also shows borrowing rates trending lower; a breakdown of interest rates by FICO and interest rates by loan size is also provided. Source
In Orchard's January 6 Weekly Snapshot it notes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's actions against Equifax and TransUnion and its new updates to the Orchard Lendscape; data on publicly traded online lenders shows OnDeck with a monthly gain of 11.21% and Square continuing to report gains with a monthly return of 9.72%; in UK listed funds the VPC Specialty Lending Fund led gains with a monthly return of 10.07% followed by P2P Global Investments with a monthly gain of 8.84%; in the US the River North Marketplace Lending Fund reported a monthly return of -0.94%. Source