Residential real estate is the oldest and most established of all asset classes. And yet, when it comes to owning equity in homes, that has only ever been available to the individual homeowners. Sure there have been ways to tap this equity including reverse mortgage or home equity loans but there has been no real way for homeowners to partner with an institution in order to provide equity in their home.

It was in June of 2015 when we first learned that Goldman Sachs was planning to launch a consumer lending platform. This caused a great deal of buzz in the online lending industry as there was much conjecture about what this meant for everyone. We learned more about this new platform, called Marcus by Goldman Sachs, when it launched in October of last year.

The CFPB estimates there are 45 million adults in the US today who have little or no credit history. Consequently, these people are terribly underserved by traditional finance. But some companies are making inroads into this market and are doing so profitably.

For our 100th episode I thought we would do something a little different. We decided to bring the Lend Academy team (pictured above) together to get their perspective on their favorite episodes in the first 100 podcasts.

For many years we have focused on three asset classes in online lending: real estate, small business and consumer loans. There are, of course, many other related or sub-asset classes. One such asset class is litigation finance, something we have not covered on Lend Academy until now.

The new CEO of Prosper, David Kimball, has been around financial services his entire career. With previous stints at Ford Motor Credit and USAA he has the kind of experience that a company like Prosper needs. He was hired as the CFO of Prosper back in March of last year and then took over from Aaron Vermut as CEO in December.

As I have said before China is by far the largest marketplace lending market in the world. In fact, it is so large, the loan volume in the rest of the world combined would not even come to 50% of the volume happening in China today. But it is not just about size. China is also the most important country in the world with more innovation happening there than just about anywhere else.

The very first peer to peer lending platform to launch in the world was Zopa in the UK back in 2005. Prosper and Lending Club would come soon after but Zopa was the trailblazer. Today, they are continuing their trailblazing ways by becoming the first platform to start a bank.

Grameen America is a different kind of lender. The concept was started by Muhammad Yunus back in the 1970’s in Bangladesh and it has been so successful that he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Grameen America works on the same principles as the original Grameen: providing small loans to female entrepreneurs to help them start or expand a business.

Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) has been a champion for financial innovation for many years. He was one of the driving forces behind the JOBS Act that was signed into law in 2012 and he is working on several pieces of legislation today designed to encourage fintech innovation. He understands fintech better than anyone else in Congress and he is very supportive of the work we are doing as an industry.