As the marketplace lending industry has matured the supportive ecosystem is being built as we go. One of the key players in this developing ecosystem is PeerIQ. They are bringing institutional quality analytics to an asset class that previously didn’t have it.

The online lending world will converge on San Francisco on April 11-12 for LendIt USA 2016. The fourth annual conference will be the biggest ever with over 3,500 people expected. As many of you know I am one of the co-founders of this event.

There is a reason that companies like Microsoft and Oracle are some of the most successful companies of the last 25 years. The world runs on software and our industry is no different.

There are very few companies in this industry that can say they have been through multiple credit cycles. CAN Capital is one of those companies having started in 1998 and they have been profitable every year since 2007. That is quite a track record.

One of the more interesting companies in the online small business lending space is Biz2Credit. They are far more than just an online lender as you will find out in the latest edition of the Lend Academy podcast.

Real estate is probably the hottest asset class in the online lending space with dozens of platforms having launched in the past couple of years. One of the more interesting platforms is PeerStreet which was started by a former real estate attorney and a tech entrepreneur.

In just the last six years loanDepot has gone from nothing to the second largest non-bank retail lender in the country by disrupting real estate lending. Last year they launched an online personal loan product and that business is growing steadily as well.

Partnering with banks is one of the current hot topics in marketplace lending. But there is one company that has made this their core business for almost seven years now.

OnDeck is the largest online small business lender in the U.S. today and they are also the first to go public, conducting their IPO less than one week after Lending Club. So, in the second podcast episode of 2016 I thought I would go back to back with the two public companies in our space.

Since we last had Renaud Laplanche, the CEO and founder of Lending Club, on the Lend Academy Podcast in the summer of 2014 a lot has happened. Lending Club has gone public and they have grown to a scale where they are now issuing billions of dollars in new loans every quarter.