Now that Lending Club is past its crisis mode and is just another mature company that has to impress investors with predictable growth in financials on a quarterly basis, we look at where the puck is headed in Lending.
What innovation will change the Lending game and create companies as big as Lending Club ten years from now?
Disclosure: I sold shares in Lending Club just before their recent quarterly earnings (Q4), having been fortunate enough to buy in at 3.51 after writing this post. Although I expect Lending Club to do well, the shares no longer have the great margin of safety that they did right after the crisis in May.
This post looks at four innovations that focus on two big imperatives facing any Lending entrepreneur – reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (where Customer = Borrower) and reducing Cost Of Capital (reducing the intermediary cost):
- The next generation Deposit Account
- Just in time Borrowing by consumers
- Big Data for the lending to Micro Entrepreneurs
- Automated working capital financing for SME
The next generation Deposit Account.
One big reason Banks have a low cost of capital is that consumers are willing to put up with lousy interest rates in order to get safety i.e. to know that their money is not at risk. The next generation Deposit Account could change that and our thesis is that the next generation Deposit Account will be based on the Lending Account.
Market Place Lending has created the first real banking innovation in hundreds of years which is the Lending Account. Until the likes of Prosper, Lending Club, Funding Circle and Lufax came along, consumers could have a Deposit Account (lend money to a bank) and a Loan Account (borrow money from a Bank) but could not directly lend in any simple scalable way.
This post shows how one Consumer has used Lending Accounts to make good money, much better than Lending to a Bank via a Deposit Account.
Most people don’t want to a) work that hard b) take that much risk. This is where the next generation Deposit Account is awaiting a great entrepreneur. The next generation Deposit Account will be a Lending Account that is ultra low risk and short tenor. Let’s start with tenor. If you are willing to lock up your capital for a few years, you can use existing Market Place Lending accounts. Compare the risk-adjusted return over 3 years compared to locking up your money in a 3 year Deposit account or a AAA Sovereign Bond and the Market Place Lending account looks pretty good.
However, most people want to have cash available at short notice for emergencies. They might want the notice/tenor to be weeks or at most months. That is hard to do using Market Place Lending accounts because the Borrower needs longer to repay. Unless you work hard to resell on a Secondary Market such as Foliofn, this is not an option.
This requires some financial engineering – the sort of thing that Wall Street has always done well. Through a mix of securitization, secondary markets and a cap & floor based guaranty, this is feasible. The arbitrage between lending to bank (Deposit account) and lending directly is big enough to give any entrepreneur enough to play with.
A note on securitization. Although securitization is seen as the villain of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, there is nothing wrong with securitization per se. The issue is transparency. If you can hide a bunch of dodgy BBB loans in a shiny AAA package that is bad. If BBB loans are sold to those who know how to manage the risk/reward trade off, then markets are working as they should.
In addition to financial engineering, some UX magic is needed to make this as simple for consumers as opening a Deposit Account.
If anybody is working on this, please let us know in comments.
Just in time Borrowing by consumers
The way a Market Place Lender like Lending Club or Prosper finds borrowers is remarkably old-fashioned. There is a lot of direct mail and search engine marketing to find consumers who want to refinance expensive credit card debt.
What if you eliminated the credit card phase and the Market Place Lender could acquire customers at the point of sale? That is what Klarna is doing for example; the proposition is bill me and I promise to pay. That can work in small, homogenous and relatively wealthy countries (eg Nordics, Switzerland) where the default rates will be relatively low.
This can also work at the opposite end of the spectrum in huge and relatively poor countries (such as China, India, Africa) where Credit Card penetration is low ie new models can appear at the point of sale to deliver lower cost borrowing to consumers at the point of purchase.
What is unclear is whether these new borrower acquisition models at the point of purchase will be part of a Lending Marketplace or part of an ecosystem that delivers customers to the Lending Marketplaces.
Big Data for the lending to Micro Entrepreneurs
You can lend to business or consumer or to the grey area in between of the self-employed “micro entrepreneur” where companies like Iwoca operate. The key here is that the revenue sources for these self-employed micro entrepreneurs are data rich services such as Uber, AirBnB, Amazon, Alibaba, eBay etc and data is the key to assessing lending risk.
Automated working capital financing for SME
Approved Payables Finance when the SME sells to Global 2000 type Corporates is working well. The APR is far lower than the SME would get from traditional finance or AltFi and Lenders get short tenor, self-liquidating high grade debt at far better interest rates than Sovereign Bond lending.
To date this has remained a niche play, despite working so well. This will scale when two things happen:
– An open standard drives e-invoicing to 90% plus adoption (the remaining 10% can be forced, enabing huge cuts in AR and AP processes). Once AR and AP is entirely digital, inserting just in time working capital financing options is easy.
– A credit rating for SME; today this only works when buyer is “investment grade”i.e. a corporate with a credit rating from an agency such as Moody’s, S&P or Fitch . If a butcher selling to a baker or candlestick maker could evaluate the credit rating of the baker or candlestick maker, pricing credit would be simple and thus the APR would come down a lot. This is not rocket science and as always it is a data problem. All you need to know is does the baker or candlestick maker pay their bills on time.
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If anybody is working on solutions for the kind of innovation profiled here that we have not already mentioned, please tell us in comments.
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