Lending Club Partners with Millennium Trust Company

The US market’s largest marketplace lender Lending Club Corp today announced a strategic partnership with Millennium Trust Company, a firm that provides custody solutions for IRA rollovers, alternative assets and private funds. Lending Club becomes the latest investment platform to join the Millennium Alternative Investment Network (MAIN), a centralised online service that simplifies the custody of alternative investments for individual investors and advisors, and provides them with access to a wide network of online investment platforms, offering a range of alternative investment options.

With $17.4bn in assets under custody and more than 432,000 accounts under administration, Millennium Trust Company provides custody services for both alternative and traditional assets. The company doesn’t offer due diligence services on prospective investments, performing only the duties of a directed custodian.

Millennium Trust developed MAIN for three reasons: to provide an efficient solution for advisors and individuals looking to include alternatives in their IRAs; to provide investors with deep knowledge about alternative assets; and to modernise the process of opening and funding an account entirely online.

Meg Zwick, Millennium Trust's senior vice president and director of alternative custody services, offered comment:

"The alternatives space is ripe for innovation. MAIN is one of the industry's first online solutions designed to help simplify the historically paper-heavy process of investing in alternative assets. Our technology-driven approach to custody is a perfect match for a company like Lending Club; both of us are using technology to transform the way our industries work and drive efficiencies into outdated, cumbersome processes."

Individuals and advisors can now directly access the Lending Club platform through MAIN and can seamlessly set up and manage Millennium Trust custody accounts. Through Lending Club, investors are able to build a diversified portfolio of loans in a quick and simple way. Advisors can also easily set up custody accounts on behalf of their clients at Millennium Trust and can efficiently build and manage portfolios through Lending Club to suit their client's investment objectives.

Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Lending Club, added:

“MAIN gives Lending Club new access to individual investors and financial advisors. Since launching in 2007, Lending Club has delivered access for retail investors to invest in consumer credit that has delivered net annual returns of 5-8% historically since inception and we look forward to expanding our distribution with this strategic relationship."