Public Perception of Online P2P Lending Applications

Abstract

This study examines significant topics and customer sentiments conveyed in reviews of P2P lending applications (apps) in India by employing topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The apps considered are LenDenClub, Faircent, i2ifunding, India Money Mart, and Lendbox. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we identified and labeled 11 topics: application, document, default, login, reject, service, CIBIL, OTP, returns, interface, and withdrawal. The sentiment analysis tool VADER revealed that most users have positive attitudes toward these apps. We also compared the five apps overall and on specific topics. Overall, LenDenClub had the highest proportion of positive reviews. We also compared the prediction abilities of six machine-learning models. Logistic Regression demonstrates high accuracy with all three feature extraction techniques: bag of words, term frequency-inverse document frequency, and hashing. The study assists borrowers and lenders in choosing the most appropriate application and supports P2P lending platforms in recognizing their strengths and weaknesses.