LendingClub Corp. said Tuesday it would raise interest rates for new loans by an average of 0.25% to match the Federal Reserve’s move earlier in December.
The announcement means that people who borrow money through Lending Club, who often seek to pay back more expensive credit-card debt, will bear the cost of the Fed’s recent increase in the benchmark federal-funds rate.
The Fed move has also led credit-card issuers to increase their prime rate by the same amount, so Lending Club will maintain the same edge in terms of the difference between its loans and credit-card rates.
Online platforms such as Lending Club rely on being able to offer borrowers better terms than traditional banks, in part because they have lower costs. The platforms find borrowers and sell their loans to investors, collecting a fee in the process. Investors in Lending Club’s notes will reap the benefits of the rate move by getting higher returns on new loans they buy.
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The move by Lending Club may indicate a shifting dynamic for peer-to-peer lenders, which have mostly been competing for new borrowers via direct mail and personal-finance websites, while enjoying a long queue of investors starved for yield by rock-bottom interest rates.
Lending Club could have done nothing, essentially giving borrowers a free pass on the rising cost of credit. But Chief Executive Renaud Laplanche said that Lending Club’s more effective marketing and targeting of borrowers mean that higher rates wouldn’t slow down the platform’s growth.
“We’ve said many times we are neither supply nor demand-constrained,” said Mr. Laplanche in an interview. “There has been noise about competition for borrowers, but that’s been the case for smaller platforms competing hard in obvious channels. We’ve had better marketing efficiency every single quarter since we went public.”
The cost of finding borrowers has been a major focus for investors in Lending Club and has been one reason that the stock has tumbled this year from its highs reached following a successful IPO last December. Shares of Lending Club have dropped around 55% so far in 2015.
It isn’t yet clear whether other platforms will also increase their rates. The move may be a show of strength for Lending Club, but could also leave it at a disadvantage if others don’t follow.
Mr. Laplanche said the move helped to distinguish Lending Club from big banks, which Lending Club may have to increasingly compete with for investor and borrower attention amid rising rates.
“We’ve gotten a lot of calls and emails from [retail investors] pretty pissed at their banks for not giving them better rates in their savings accounts” and pocketing the difference, he said. “We are not doing that. We are passing on the benefit to investors.”
He said that Lending Club’s policy will be to move “in lockstep” with the Fed’s future rate moves.
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