At LendingRobot we are always faced with the challenge of balancing powerful features with simplicity and ease-of-use. As anyone who has ever had to choose an ice cream from the local grocer’s freezer knows, too much choice can be a problem. You would get a similar feeling looking at the 30 filters that LendingClub offers on their web site: that’s a lot of filters to play with, and the pay-off is not clear – many of those filters don’t show any statistically significant correlation with returns, so there is no point in using them in your searches.

Therefore when designing LendingRobot, we launched it initially with only a subset of filters – those that exhibited significant correlation with returns. We believed we would not be serving our users well by exposing LC’s entire list of 30 filters, and preferred to add them over time based on feedback from our users.

And this is what we are doing today. Over the last several weeks we received valuable and detailed feedback (thank you dear users!), and today we are updating LendingRobot with new filters you can add to your rules.
So without further ado, these are the first new filters:

Loan amount: range for loan amount (from \$1000 to \$35,000)

Public records: number of derogatory public records, such as bankruptcy, lien, or judgment against the borrower (0, 1, 2, 3, or any number).

State: The borrower’s state.

We are also introducing something quite new today; here again, based on our users’ suggestions. LendingRobot adds two other filters that are not available on LendingClub. You could find loans with those criteria, but until now it would have required some manual work. Those filters are:

Sub-grades: We are replacing the “grades” filter with the more fine-grain sub-grades filter – you can specify, for example, sub-grades between B3 to D4.

Loan Payment / Income: what percentage of the reported monthly income is the monthly loan payment: for example, if the monthly payment is \$320, and the borrower reported monthly income of \$4800, payment is 6.7% of income. This can serve as a good indication of the borrower’s ability to pay back the loan.

So when you have a minute head to LendingRobot and check your rules – see if you would like to include any of the new filters in your rules.

And as always, don’t hesitate to send us an email with any ideas or suggestions!