Lending Club Going Public

After months of speculation about the when, Lending Club Corp. has started down the path to going public, tapping banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to help them put together an IPO for later 2014.

The P2P lending platform connects investors to individual borrowers and SMBs. The platform has made more than $4 billion in loans possible since its inception.

The IPO could make as much as $500 million-the company was valued at around $4 billion during its last fundraising round, though it could now move to seek a higher valuation.

Lending Club founder and Chief Executive Renaud Laplanche told The Wall Street Journal in an interview last year that an IPO would likely have a larger number of retail investors given the overall corporate vision of Lending Club. To push that even further, the company is considering allocating a higher than average number of shares to small retail investors, though the details of that are being considered, according to the source.

Lending Club sold shares privately in April to public mutual fund investors T. Rowe Price Group Inc., BlackRock Inc., Sands Capital and Wellington Management Co. That came as part of a funding round, which allowed the company to complete a deal with Springstone Financial LLC- a lender specializing in elective medical procedures and private-school tuition.

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