Last week Money 20/20 lent its fintech passion to #Copenhagen, whose reach surpassed a staggering 3.2 million in a three-day period, surpassing other fintech satellite cities #NewYork and #London, the latter of which barely broke one million during the same three-day period. This week we’re looking at a lending convention lending love to San Francisco, the city that puts the tech in fintech.
With a reach of over 1.7 million over the past three days, #LendItUSA is still bigger than its host city’s hashtag, although #SanFrancisco is still popping at a reach of 1.2 million over the same period. The convention’s hot topics include loan origination, regulations, fair lending, fair debt collections, and the ever-present hope that stricter regulatory oversight will stay away, despite CFPB’s March announcement that it would begin accepting consumer complaints regarding online marketplace lenders.
This comes amidst Richard Kibbe & Orbe LLP and Wharton Fintech’s release of their 2016 Survey of U.S. Marketplace Lending, which shows that half of investors surveyed have capital allocated for marketplace lending. This is a big deal both because the online lending market is a fairly new and dynamic sector in fintech, and youth in fintech usually doesn’t lend itself to great success, a la unicorns. But 80% of investors surveyed had high to medium levels of optimism for the continued growth of marketplace lending.
One optimistic authority on lending, Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche, explained some of the interesting challenges facing marketplace lenders this year. Apparently unsecured consumer lending is one of the more regulation-heavy kinds of loans, and this limitation extends to many marketplace lenders using a bank-partner model to originate loans.