May will go down as a great month for p2p lending. Lending Club broke yet another record by originating over $18.5 million in loans for the month. And Prosper continued their strong upward trend with new loan volume of over $5.6 million.
As is usual Lending Club saw a big last day surge in new loans issued as the institutional money came rolling in. This month the surge was bigger than ever – over $5 million was put into new loans today which has to be a record for any single day in the history of peer to peer lending. The number of loans was also a record – 1,704 loans were issued in May for an average of $10,875 per loan. Below is the monthly new loan chart going back to January last year. The black line is the three month moving average.
Prosper continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Just six months ago, in November 2010, Prosper originated around $2.6 million in new loans. In May 2011 that number had grown to $5.6 million, a staggering increase of 112%. As you can see by the chart below the three month rolling average curve continues to grow steeply. Prosper also saw the introduction of a large institutional lender this month. Going by the screen name of worth-blanket2 this lender invested over $1.2 million alone this month. That certainly helped Prosper wrap up a great month.
