03 Feb 2015, 5:16 pm
Alibaba, has reached an agreement with US based Lending Club to offer business financing for Alibaba's US customers. Lending Club is an eight-year-old Californian peer-to-peer online lending company that links would-be lenders with borrowers. It does not lend money itself.
The service will offer loans of up to US$300,000 (£199,000) to Alibaba's US customers buying goods from China-based suppliers on Alibaba.com. In the exclusive arrangement, Lending Club becomes the main source of US buyer financing on Alibaba.com.
Financing will be available for between one and six months. Applications will take less than five minutes to process, the companies said, and monthly fixed interest rates will be between 0.5% and 2.4%.
Michael Lee, Alibaba.com's global marketing and business development director, said, "Our mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. We want to make financing as efficient as possible for the millions of US buyers that do business through Alibaba.com and are pleased to bring Lending Club's simple, low cost and transparent financing products to our US buyers."
