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[Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Jeremy Todd, Head of West Coast Sales at Orchard Platform. Orchard Platform...
Orchard stresses the importance of recovery rates in valuing pools of loans; blog post takes Orchard’s US unsecured consumer lending industry data and discusses what loan recoveries are, how they are calculated, how debt holders recover defaulted loan balances, and why recovery rates are so important. Source
Orchard has updated its Lendscape with three new categories; the three new buckets include law firms, verification and auto; law firms and verification providers have been significantly contributing to the ecosystem; in auto lending, platforms that have emerged include AutoFi, DriverUp, Drive Sally, Lending Club and MotorEnvy; other categories with new companies include loan servicing, education and institutional investors. Source
Orchard has released a comprehensive report analyzing platform data attributes across the marketplace lending industry; the white paper is titled, "Making Loan Data Actionable"; provides insight on varying data management strategies across the industry and explores an accounting standard for alternative marketplace loans; Orchard has taken the lead on marketplace lending data standardization due to its association with the majority of the industry's lending network. Source
In Orchard's Weekly Online Lending Snapshot they provide some insight on the Marketplace Lending and Alternative Financing Summit, noting industry performance and data transparency as key themes; data points show gains from publicly traded companies in the industry led by LendingTree with a monthly gain of 19.93% and Square with a monthly gain of 16.17%; in the UK listed marketplace lending funds Ranger Direct Lending led monthly returns with a gain of 24%; the US listed River North Marketplace Lending Fund reported a monthly gain of 0.59%; the LendingClub Issuance Trust LCIT-2016-NP2 was listed as the most recent securitization issuance with a pricing date of December 1. Source
Orchard reports on the diversity of business lending, breaking lending down by industry and state using data from Orchard; reports that they have the most data on retail trade followed by health care and social assistance, and construction; shares the concentration of lending of several industries by state. Source
According to a report in Bloomberg online small business lender Kabbage is getting set to acquire Orchard. The companies have not yet confirmed and the cost of a potential deal is also not known. Source.