Interested in becoming a banker? Now, you can, with several different avenues. The largest currently are Prosper and Lending Club. There’s a few others, and a couple in startup and pre-startup (hint hint). Here’s a cool ABC News story about Lending Club and a guy who got 15 bank rejections for his loan application for seed money for a business before 74 strangers on Lending Club listened to his pitch and chipped in for $25,000 total.

A few weeks back I opened accounts on both Prosper and LC and deposited $1,000 in each just to test it out. I’ve used the automated bidding mechanism to create a portfolio with a large chunk at moderate risk and a small bit (15% of portfolio) at higher risk. So far, Prosper has lent out $900 in 18 loans at an average rate of 15.59%. LC is more difficult to work with for the way I want automated bidding to work (I’m not interested in people’s stories, only their credit grade, debt ratios, and so on — all the classic criteria). Lending Club has now lent out $750 in 29 loans averaging 12.05%.

I’ll be blogging much more about this in the future. The surface of what can be done with this in terms of risk management, creative hard-money finance, international arbitrage, and so on, has not even been scratched.

HT: Rate Ladder