Prosper Marketplace, Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based financial services company. Prosper Funding LLC, one of its subsidiaries, operates Prosper.com, a website where individuals can request to borrow money, open a credit card, or invest in personal loans.
Peer-to-peer lending, also abbreviated as P2P lending, is the practice of lending money to individuals or businesses through online services that match lenders with borrowers. Peer-to-peer lending companies often offer their services online, and attempt to operate with lower overhead and provide their services more cheaply than traditional financial institutions. As a result, lenders can earn higher returns compared to savings and investment products offered by banks, while borrowers can borrow money at lower interest rates, even after the P2P lending company has taken a fee for providing the match-making platform and credit checking the borrower. There is the risk of the borrower defaulting on the loans taken out from peer-lending websites.
LendingClub is a financial services company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was the first peer-to-peer lender to register its offerings as securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and to offer loan trading on a secondary market. At its height, LendingClub was the world's largest peer-to-peer lending platform. The company reported that $15.98 billion in loans had been originated through its platform up to December 31, 2015.
Zopa Bank Ltd. is a British online bank which offers deposit accounts, personal loans and credit cards. It began as the world's first peer-to-peer lending company in 2005 and gained a full banking licence in 2020. The peer-to-peer side of its business closed in December 2021.
Funding Circle is a commercial lender. Originally it was a peer-to-peer lending marketplace that allowed the public to lend money directly to small and medium-sized businesses. Through this exchange businesses access lower costs of financing than they would get at a bank and the public are able to become lenders and in doing so make a return on their capital. It closed its lending option to "retail investors" between 2020 and 2022, and then announced, in March 2022, that it had made the closure permanent.
Upstart is an AI lending platform that partners with banks and credit unions to provide consumer loans using non-traditional variables, such as education and employment, to predict creditworthiness.
CircleUp is a financial technology company based in San Francisco that focuses on consumer goods startups. Since its official launch in April 2012, CircleUp has helped several consumer companies raise equity, including Back to the Roots, Halo Top Creamery, Little Duck Organics, Rhythm Superfoods and others. General Mills has an investment fund that is partnered with CircleUp to invest in companies listed on the platform.
MicroVentures is an equity crowdfunding website that offers investments in early stage companies. It connects accredited investors with startups, businesses and services looking to raise funds or participate in select secondary market opportunities.
SoFi Technologies, Inc. is an American personal finance and financial technology company. Founded in 2011 at Stanford University, it operates as a direct bank and supports other financial institutions through its technology platform. As of 2024, SoFi reports 9.4 million customers and 160 million platform accounts.
Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020. It also operates a cryptocurrency exchange and provides institutional markets lending business and data, charts, and analytics.
Avant, LLC, formerly AvantCredit, is a private Chicago, Illinois-based company in the financial technology industry. The company was established in 2012 by serial entrepreneur Albert "Al" Goldstein, John Sun, and Paul Zhang. Initially structured as a mid-prime lender, the company issued its first personal unsecured loan in early 2013 using its proprietary technology to determine an individual's creditworthiness.
Mark Tluszcz is an American businessman and venture capitalist who is co-founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners, a venture capital firm he set up in 2000. He also serves as Chairman of Wix.com (NASDAQ:WIX), a popular website building platform. His achievements include turning a $2m investment in Skype into $200m and a $8m investment in Wix.com into $700m.
Prodigy Finance is a fintech platform that enables financing for international postgraduate students who attend a participating business school or postgraduate institution.
Grow is a financial technology company that has formed strategic partnerships with various credit unions to extend its product offerings and online lending services. headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia and founded by Kevin Sandhu and Daniel Cowx in 2014. It started as a technology driven online consumer lender. Grow's platform enabled borrowers to obtain a loan, which were then sold to private accredited investors and institutional investors. The company later evolved its business model to partner with banks and credit unions to provide its proprietary technology to power traditional financial services companies' digital presence. On February 10, 2016 Grow announced its first partnership with a Canadian financial institution: First West Credit Union. The partnership enabled members of First West Credit Union to access the range of Grow product offerings directly through the British Columbian financial institution. The announcement with First West was followed on February 25, 2016, by a second partnership announcement with Conexus Credit Union, the largest credit union in Saskatchewan, in order to bring its online lending services to the province.
Financial technology is an industry composed of companies that use technology to offer financial services. These companies operate in insurance, asset management and payment, and numerous other industries. FinTech has emerged as a relatively new industry in India in the past few years. The Indian market has witnessed massive investments in various sectors adopting FinTech, which has been driven partly by the robust and effective government reforms that are pushing the country towards a digital economy. It has also been aided by the growing internet and smartphone penetration, leading to the adoption of digital technologies and the rise of FinTech in the country
LendEDU is an online marketplace for a variety of financial products, including student loans, personal loans, and credit cards. It has been compared to Lendingtree.com, but for student lending. In 2018, LendEDU encountered controversy when it was revealed to be the undisclosed owner of "Student Loan Report", and its CEO was accused of "deceiving news organizations with a fake source".
WeLab Limited is a Hong Kong financial technology company offering a range of services, such as online consumer credit platforms and virtual banking. It was founded in January 2013 by Simon Loong, Kelly Wong and Frances Kang and is best known for being the parent company of WeLab Bank, one of the first virtual banks to be granted a license to operate in Hong Kong.
Funding Societies is a Southeast Asian digital financing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), headquartered in Singapore. It was the first such platform in Singapore to engage an escrow agency to independently and safely manage investors’ funds. In Indonesia it is known as Modalku. Since its launch, it has disbursed more than US$2.6 billion in business financing to MSMEs through more than 5.1 million loan transactions.
Groundfloor is an American real estate investing and lending marketplace. It was the first real estate crowdfunding company to achieve SEC qualification utilizing Regulation A+ after the regulation became operable through the JOBS Act.
SoLo Funds operates a community peer-to-peer lending platform, founded in 2018. The company announced 1 million registered users as of 2023, making it reportedly the largest black-owned financial technology company in the United States.
