[...] By qualifying loan applicants, Lending Club is managing a commons resource for lenders. Once it became clear that Lending Club was a source of potential borrowers, big financial firms realized they could take advantage of this commons. Hedge funds were the first institutions to join the opportunity and now “big financial firms, not small investors, dominate lending on the two platforms [Lending Club and its competitor Prosper].”  While peer-to-peer loans were primarily “fractional,” in that several small lenders would combine to fund a loan, by March 2015 “65% of the more than $3 billion loans on the two platforms [Prosper and Lending Club] came from investors snatching up whole loans, which are almost always made by institutional investors rather than individuals.”