Photo

Related Links Document: Amended Prospectus

Lending Club shot to prominence nearly eight years ago by helping borrowers and lenders avoid big banks and find each other directly through the Internet. Now, the lending platform is hoping that Wall Street investors will flock to buy into its forthcoming initial public offering.

The company disclosed in an amended prospectus on Monday that it planned to price its stock sale at $10 to $12 a share, potentially raising up to $692.4 million.

At the midpoint of that range, it would be valued at about $4 billion.

As Lending Club executives take to the road for the next week to meet with potential investors, they are aiming to convince those institutions — including investment arms of some of the banks the company has sought to displace — that the prospects of the peer-to-peer lending industry it helped create are looking brighter than ever.

A lot is riding on the company’s initial offering. Should it succeed, other alternative lenders, including competitors like Prosper Marketplace and the small-business specialist OnDeck Capital, might also look to tap institutional investors for millions of dollars in their own market debuts.

Determining the best pricing for Lending Club’s I.P.O. has been tricky because the company will be in a league of its own when it begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker symbol LC. No other alternative lender trades on the public markets, meaning that Lending Club’s bankers will have to use otherwise unrelated comparisons like nonfinancial Internet start-ups as benchmarks for the company’s performance.

Behind the rise of such lenders is the belief that traditional banks, hamstrung by tougher capital requirements and expensive infrastructures, have stopped providing certain kinds of loans, particularly to smaller borrowers.

Lending Club’s business model revolves around using advanced computer algorithms to match those seeking money with those willing to provide it. Customers who have relatively high-quality credit, with FICO scores starting at about 660, can borrow up to $35,000 at interest rates averaging about 14 percent.

The initial lenders on the service were individuals, but now a significant percentage are big mutual funds and hedge funds.

And though the company began with personal loans, meant for borrowers looking to refinance credit card debt with high interest rates, it has moved into other offerings. Small businesses can now borrow up to $100,000 through the platform.

Moreover, in November, the lending platform unveiled a new two-year “superprime” loan offering that lets customers borrow up to $10,000 at an interest rate of less than 5 percent.

Lending Club already has the backing of some of the biggest names on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Its board includes Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary; John J. Mack, the former chief executive of Morgan Stanley; and Mary Meeker, the venture capitalist and onetime star Internet analyst.

And its existing investors include Google, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the mutual fund giants T. Rowe Price and BlackRock.

Should the I.P.O. price at the high end of its range with $12 a share, several of Lending Club’s other shareholders will see their wealth rise, at least on paper. The holdings of Norwest Venture Partners, which will amount to 14 percent of the company after the stock sale, will be worth nearly $610 million. Shares held by Renaud Laplanche, the company’s chief executive, will be worth about $178.8 million.

The I.P.O. is being led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Citigroup.