Orchard Offers Investment-Manager Listing for Marketplace Loans

Orchard Platform, an analytics firm that pairs institutional investors with marketplace lending platforms, has launched an investment-manager database.

Matt Burton, co-founder and chief executive of Orchard, said that many of the company's approximately 100 institutional customers have asked for investment manager and fund recommendations, placing the company in the potentially awkward position of playing favorites.

"We're very agnostic" on managers and platforms, Burton said.

So the platform — which already maintains the only U.S. consumer marketplace lending index — decided to establish a database of investment managers to allow institutions to do their own shopping.

"A lot of the [investment] funds in this space are marketplace lending only," Burton said.

Coupled with the manager listing the platform has also released a white paper entitled "The Essential Eight Best Practices to Marketplace Lending Investing" on its blog to guide potential clients and investors.

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