Recent Changes to Lending Club’s API

Lending Club is in the process of making changes to their API, so we thought it would be a good idea to explain how these changes affect the LendingRobot investor community.

If you only care about the big picture and would rather be spared the details, this is the bottom line:

1. If you already enabled API access to your Lending Club account, and set up LendingRobot to use the API – you are already good to go, no further action is required. We will deal with all the changes.
2. If you have not set up API access, please go ahead and do it – it will soon be required, and Lending Club made it easier to enable it for your account – just click this link, follow the instructions, and then go to your account settings in LendingRobot and set up the API settings.
3. If you built your own investment rules, and you use “New Accounts (24 months)” as one of your criteria, you should change your rule to exclude this criterion – Lending Club will remove it from the data it provides on Dec. 10th 2014.

If you don’t care about the “under-the-hood” details – you’re done. For the curious bunch, here’re some more details:

New REST API

You may have received an email from Lending Club recently, telling you about a new REST API. This is a more modern and complete version of the API Lending Club provides to automate loan selection and investment. For LendingRobot investors, the important news is that with this new API Lending Club added some features missing from the previous version (e.g. checking the cash balance on your account). That means that once we are done with the transition to the new API, we will no longer need your Lending Club password – we will get all the information we need through the API.

With this change, we are going to require enabling the API for your account in order to use LendingRobot.

Once we complete the transition to the new API, we are going to delete from our database all passwords to LendingClub accounts – we will no longer need them.

Changes to Data Provided by Lending Club

Lending Club recently announced changes to the data it makes available to investors (details here). The changes include removing 44 fields from the data made available for every loan. Of those fields, only one is currently used as a filtering criterion on LendingRobot: “New Accounts (24 months)”. If you use this criterion in your investment rules, you should modify them before December 10th 2014.

Investors that rely on LendingRobot’s statistical model (using “expected return” in their rules) don’t have to do anything – our model is not affected by the changes.

If you still have any questions, shoot us an email to help@lendingrobot.com.

Regards,

The LendingRobot team.