EDIT: I rescind my statement. If LC fails, both lenders and investors are going to have a bad time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/4jqaal/lending_c...
"From their prospectus: Our arrangements for backup servicing are limited. If we fail to maintain operations, you will experience a delay and increased cost in respect of your expected principal and interest payments on the Notes, and we may be unable to collect and process repayments from borrowers. We have made arrangements for only limited backup servicing. If our platform were to fail or we became insolvent, we would attempt to transfer our Loan servicing obligations to our third-party back-up servicer. There can be no assurance that this back-up servicer will be able to adequately perform the servicing of the outstanding Loan. If this back-up servicer assumes the servicing of the Loan, the back-up servicer will impose additional servicing fees, reducing the amounts available for payments on the Notes. Additionally, transferring these servicing obligations to our back-up servicer may result in delays in the processing and recovery of information with respect to amounts owed on the Loan or, if our platform becomes inoperable, may prevent us from servicing the Loan and making principal and interest payments on the Notes. If our back-up servicer is not able to service the Loan effectively, investors’ ability to receive principal and interest payments on their Notes may be substantially impaired."
That same $5 Billion is owed by Lending Club to lenders. A portion of the lenders are institutions. The remainder are also at the retail level. I don't know the average amount loaned per investor, but I'd guess there are more than 100,000 lenders.
Contractually, through Lending Club in the middle, those hundreds of thousands of borrowers owe the hundred thousand lenders that $5 Billion, which will be paid off over (at most) 5 years.
As the middle-man, Lending Club collects about 1% in fees. That is $50 million in fees outanding.
If Lending Club ceases operation, that $5 Billion is still contractually owed by the borrowers to the lenders. In Lending Club's prospectus, under bankruptcy or if they become unable to process loan payments, the whole thing transfers to a trust, 'Portfolio Financial Servicing Company (“PFSC”)'[3] to continue collecting from borrowers and paying lenders.
This is shaping up to be a pretty interesting situation. If legal expenses, ballooning compensation and declining loan origination revenues eat up Lending Club's cash and drive them to bankruptcy, a bankruptcy court judge is going to have to decide on the fate of these hundreds of thousands of Lending Club customers.
Is there a precedent for this? Would a fail-over to PFSC definitely happen? Is it possible a judge could rule that money being paid back by borrowers is to be used to pay off LC stock holders, should shareholder lawsuits prevail?
[1] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ALC&fstype=ii&ei=vzI7... (select Balance Sheet)
[2] I don't know the actual average, but the max is $35,000. The average may be much lower since many loans are paid down below $10k already.
[3] http://kb.lendingclub.com/investor/articles/Investor/What-ha...
The "paying lenders" part is partially correct. Only the Lenders that are part of LC Trust I, Lending Club Advisors (LCA), and one another entity (name escapes me at the moment) will get paid as these entities are Bankruptcy Remote Vehicle (BRV). As I mentioned in another comment, the Retail Lenders don't have any BRV protection so they will be considered unsecured creditor of Lending Club.
As debt is senior to equity, debt holders will get paid before equity holders. The unsecured creditor is subordinate to any senior debt holder, the retail lenders will be last one to be paid before equity holders. Source: Read the SEC Filings - prospectus and 10-K.
Also from your PFSC link:
"If the underlying loans are determined to be part of Lending Club’s bankruptcy estate, PFSC may not be able to make payments on the Notes."
Details of some of those arrangements were disclosed Monday: Acting CEO Scott Sanborn received a grant of restricted stock valued at $5 million and his salary was increased to $500,000. Chief Financial Officer Carrie Dolan received $3.5 million of restricted stock units and her salary was increased to $400,000. Both executives also received $500,000 cash awards that will pay out in a year."
Out of curiosity, how common is this? To me this sounds like grabbing everything you can and heading for the exits before the building burns down, but I'm not familiar with the pay range for CEOs/CFOs in their location. You don't hear anything about others in the company receiving similar packages.
A lot can be done to turn the ship around in a year. If they don't, the stock grants (depending on issue price) will be worth a lot less than originally issued, and they'll mainly have a highly taxed bonus. The grants are to prevent opportunity cost of leaving from being considered.
If they turn it around, the stock grants will be easily worth it. The company was worth $3b+ weeks ago. Now it's dipped below $1.5b. If they can fix that, that's a small price to pay.
I think regulation is coming soon to the alternative-loan industry as a whole. In regards to the LendingClub specifically, I can't speak for much since the details in the article are lacking, but it appears that there was some kind of falsification or "data errors" on securitized loans sold to banks or third parties. Based on how they are structured, I would guess that an investors audit of loans originated by Lending Club came up with some inconsistencies that didn't meet the purchase guidelines, triggering Lending Club to have to buy back the entirety of the security.
Here is a better article about the issue that caused the resignation of the CEO.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-10/jefferies-...
The specific information that was changed on the loans in question was the application date. It had nothing to do with credit quality, or rates to consumers. The reason they changed the dates was because the bank they were selling them to wanted different wording of the legal language in the loan application document and they asked that the language be changed. LendingClub employees changed the application date on some loans to make it appear as though the customers had applied for the loan after that legal language change happened when in fact they had agreed to only the old terms.
It's not honest for sure and shouldn't have been done but at the same time it was caught and corrected and isn't the end of the world. A lot of the negativity narrative is coming from hedge funds who have piled into short positions in LC stock.
[0] http://www.consumerfinance.gov/askcfpb/1567/what-payday-loan...
[1] https://www.lendingclub.com/public/rates-and-fees.action
