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[Editor’s note: This is a guest post from David Snitkof, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder of Orchard Platform. Orchard Platform is...
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 December 30 Weekly Snapshot it highlights reports from Even, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and American Banker; in online lending stocks, Square reported the highest monthly return, trading at $13.73 for a gain of 6.11%; in UK listed stocks, the VPC Specialty Lending Fund led monthly returns with a gain of 8.01%; in US listed marketplace lending funds, the River North Marketplace Lending Fund had a one month return of -0.87%. Source
Orchard published its Weekly Online Lending Snapshot with data through Tuesday of the Thanksgiving holiday week; commentary focuses on increased lending to small businesses and highlights Small Business Saturday which occurred on November 26; the Weekly Snapshot shows publicly traded marketplace lending company returns led by LendingClub with a monthly gain of 22.38% and LendingTree with a monthly gain of 16.09%; UK listed funds all reported losses on a monthly return basis with the VPC Specialty Lending Fund leading losses at -10.38% followed by the P2P Global Investments Fund reporting a monthly loss of -7.12%; the US listed, River North Marketplace Lending Fund has reported a positive monthly gain of 0.83%; in securitizations, SoFi is the latest issuer with the SoFi Professional Loan Program LLC (SOFI-2016-E) priced on November 17. Source
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
In a Q & A with Forbes, Matt Burton, CEO of Orchard discusses the early days of marketplace lending and how Orchard came to be; the company has raised $45 million and has institutional investors across the globe who utilize the platform; Burton also talks about their focus on the secondary market and what upcoming startups he thinks are interesting. Source
China represents 18.5% of the total world population and its business commerce has been growing rapidly; it also reports the four largest fintech unicorn valuations, Ant Financial, Lufax, JD Finance and Qufenqi; Matt Burton from Orchard Platform reports on these statistics and more in a recent blog post also highlighting the emphasis on mobile payments and technology services for the underbanked and unbanked; while China's fintech sector has shown exponential growth, the government is now increasing its focus on financial protection which is expected to improve the quality of fintech businesses; in the blog post, Burton also provides a list of companies he is watching by region in Asia. Source