Why P2P marketplace lending is so successful

For years I have been investing in (and on) p2p lending platforms such as LendingClub, Prosper and Dianrong, and I have been writing about it on this blog (e.g. see this post from 2012). Although people were skeptical at first a lot of my friends now invest part of their savings there, simply because returns are so much better than what you can get at banks or in other debt investments.

To give you an idea, at LendingClub I have made consistently over 8% net (=after write-offs) for years. I also invest in funds that do leveraged investments in platforms, where you make 3-4% per quarter (13-16% per year). These are fairly liquid investments, so your money is not tied up for years like in most of my other investments.

In China, where I am on the board of one of the leading marketplace lenders Dianrong.com, returns can be even higher. That’s mainly because there are no other sources of capital for most borrowers. Maybe I am biased, but I feel p2p lending is much more common in China than in N-America and Europe, especially because it’s so easy to lend money through mobile apps.

I think there are a couple of reasons why marketplace lending has taken off so fast globally and why it is better than traditional bank lending. Samir Desai, founder and CEO of Funding Circle, a UK based marketplace lender gave a talk at the Lendit conference in London this week in which he focused on this. I embed a video of his speech (via avc.com) and summarize his main points below.

Why are marketplace lenders better than traditional banks:

-P2P marketplace platforms don’t need to have money on their balance sheets to lend it to consumers. It’s direct p2p lending, so the platform has no inventory. In that way platforms are truly aligned with investors, for example they can’t invest in loans themselves, so there is no incentive not to put the best loans on the platform. Next to that it leads to platform being faster and cheaper.

– Platforms are completely transparant. On most platforms data about all originated loans is available in detail. Try that with traditional banks!

– Platforms only do loan origination and many platforms focus on a certain type of loans (e.g. student loans, or loans to specific categories of people). By doing this over and over and over again, they get better and better and better at it. That leads to even higher returns for investors.

– Platforms generally give the same investment opportunities to small and large lenders. It may be easier to lend as a big player because the platforms service you better, but if you are a savvy small investors you have access to the exact same loans at most platforms.

– Platforms have no systemic risk, because the maturity of the investments is the same as the maturity of the loans. This is very different from banks where short term deposits may be used for long term loans. In case of a bank run the whole bank may fall apart because of this mismatch, as was the case with Northern Rock in 2007-2008. On a p2p platform a bankrun is impossible because there is no maturity transformation.

Conclusion: P2P or marketplace lending is far superior to bank lending, is more secure, and has higher returns because of efficiency. We will therefore see a lot more growth in this kind of lending over the next couple of years. Being a shareholder in these platforms or putting money on these platforms as a lender will continue to give investors outsized returns.