Top 10 List for Online Lenders

BURLINGAME, Calif. - May 13, 2015 - PRLog -- Our team at Bay Edge Technology, Inc. has just released a Top 10 List of Online Lenders for the personal, commercial, and real estate loan markets. The rankings can be found at www.the-edge.me/ranking.

Our market researchers conducted primary research via phone calls and emails to gather the raw data for this report. We then used a propriety scoring system to evaluate lenders, which incorporates several relevant factors such as APR, loan amount, credit requirements, speed of funding, quality of customer service and complexity of loan application process. The results should prove useful for anyone facing an online borrowing decision.

It’s worth noting that our findings deliver some surprising results. For instance, the most well-known lenders did not necessarily rank highest. Lending Club, which has virtually become a household name, is ranked only 7^th on our list for personal loan providers.

One major reason for this is that the Lending Club seems to be having trouble keeping up with its enormous loan volume. This is showing up in the customer service rating from our analysts, who encountered long hold times when trying to reach a representative by phone. What’s more, Lending Club delivers offers only mediocre performance in terms of speed of funding and minimum interest rates. There are other online lenders who can underwrite personal loans quicker and more cheaply than Lending Club, which gives them an advantage.

Similarly, the infamous OnDeck ranks only 6^th in the top ten commercial loan providers. Though OnDeck has lower credit requirements, its interest rates are far higher than many of its competitors. Moreover, the maximum loan size available from OnDeck isn’t nearly as high as others in the rankings. What may come as a surprise is that Lending Club, best known for personal lending and only recently began offering business loans, ranks as our top commercial loan provider. The secret is that they’ve managed to offer lowest in class interest rates on loan amounts of considerable size.

Real Estate lender rankings are perhaps less surprising, with Asset Avenue overtaking Realty Mogul for first place solely due to the fact that Asset Avenue offers a higher maximum on its loans, willing to underwrite up to $25 mn whereas Realty Mogul stops at $10 mn. Realty Mogul does have the appeal that it allows a higher LTV (90%) than Asset Avenue (85%) but we find that the added $15 mn availability outweighs the lost 5% in LTV.

We hope you’ll take advantage of these findings as you assess the current state of the online lending marketplace.