mathbabe

So here’s something potential Fed Chair Larry Summers is involved with, a company called Lending Club, which creates a money lending system that cuts out the middle man banks.

Specifically, people looking for money come to the site and tell their stories, and try to get loans. The investors invest in whichever loans look good to them, for however much money they want. For a perspective on the risks and rewards of this kind of peer-to-peer lending operation, look at this Wall Street Journal article which explains things strictly from the investor’s point of view.

A few red flags go up for me as I learn more about Lending Club.

First, from this NYTimes article, “The company [Lending Club] itself is not regulated as a bank. But it has teamed up with a bank in Utah, one of the states that allows banks to charge high interest rates, and that bank is overseen by state regulators and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.”

I’m not sure how the FDIC is involved exactly, but the Utah connection is good for something, namely allowing high interest rates. According to the same article, 37% of loans are for APR’s of between 19% and 29%.

Next, Summers is referred to in that article as being super concerned about the ability for the consumers to pay back the loans. But I wonder how someone is supposed to be both desperate enough to go for a 25% APR loan and also able to pay back the money. This sounds like loan sharking to me.

Probably what bothers me most though is that Lending Club, in addition to offering credit scores and income when they have that information, also scores people asking for loans with a proprietary model which is, as you guessed it, unregulated. Specifically, if it’s anything like ZestFinance, could use signals more correlated to being uneducated and/or poor than to the willingness or ability to pay back loans.

By the way, I’m not saying this concept is bad for everyone- there are probably winners on the side of the loanees, and it might be possible that they get a loan they otherwise couldn’t get or they get better terms than otherwise or a more bespoke contract than otherwise. I’m more worried about the idea of this becoming the new normal of how money changes hands and how that would affect people already squeezed out of the system.

I’d love your thoughts.