- 1Sanborn says AI agents are a small share of web traffic but high intent.
- 2LendingClub expects to benefit if agents replace search or act for consumers.
- 3The company plans to produce more of its own content this year.
LendingClub sees AI agents as a net opportunity for loan acquisition, CEO Scott Sanborn told analysts on the company's Q1 earnings call. LendingClub has previously announced it is rebranding as Happen Bank.
The question
Analyst David Scharf asked how LendingClub is approaching AI-style search versus traditional search. He noted that typing a loan query into a search engine yields paid listings and comparison sites like NerdWallet, and asked about the risks and opportunities when consumers ask AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude for the best $15,000 personal loan a year from now.
Sanborn's answer
Sanborn said that while "AI" can be a buzzword, the changes are real and the company is pursuing them across departments. He said inertia is what LendingClub is trying to overcome. If agents evolve beyond replacing Google search and begin acting on consumers' behalf, he said, the company is a net beneficiary. Agentic traffic is currently a small percentage of the web, he acknowledged, but it is high intent, so LendingClub needs to be there as the share grows.
Protocols for agentic search are not yet established, Sanborn said, and many firms are already engineering around Google's changing algorithm; the same will be true for agents. LendingClub plans to pursue it as it does core organic search. For now, that likely means producing more content. The company already appears on sites such as NerdWallet's best-of lists on both sides of its balance sheet, he said, but wants to push more of its own content out this year to support that effort.
inertia is really the thing we’re trying to overcome.
Why it matters
The exchange shows how a publicly traded lender is thinking about the next distribution channel for consumer loans. Sanborn did not size the opportunity in dollars. His argument was that agentic search will follow the same playbook as traditional search: a scramble to optimize for evolving algorithms, with the winners being the firms that show up early and often.
His comments also place LendingClub inside existing comparison ecosystems today. By his account, the company is already present in the sites the analyst named, so the push is to supplement that presence with owned content built for agent discovery rather than rely only on third-party placements.
Source reporting: deBanked.
