America's Best Online Lenders 2024

America's Best Online Lenders 2024

Finding the right lender is essential in buying a new home or car or making other important investments—and it's an even bigger challenge right now, with interest rates near lifetime highs for many borrowers. Whether you are in the market for a new home loan, to refinance, to purchase a car or need an unsecured loan, choosing the right lender can require some research. In addition to looking for the best rate from an online lender, borrowers should be mindful of customer satisfaction and overall availability. The convenience of online lenders allows consumers to comparison shop in a low-pressure environment on their own schedule.

Newsweek and LendingTree are proud to announce our ranking of America's Best Online Lenders 2024. LendingTree analyzed lenders who offered loans on their platform in the first half of 2023 across home, auto and personal loans from subprime to super-prime borrowers. The ranking compares the rates across three credit ranges, reviews from customers, closed applications and the availability of loans. (After all, a great rate doesn't matter if the lender doesn't lend.) The number of winners in each category varies by the number of eligible lenders.

We hope you find our ranking helpful as you look for an online lender.

Best Online Lenders 2024

Newsweek and LendingTree

Methodology statement from LendingTree

LendingTree analyzed attributes of 163 unique lenders who offered their products to at least one customer on the LendingTree platform seeking home purchase mortgages, mortgage refinance loans, unsecured purchase loans or and auto loans between January 1, 2023 and June 30, 2023.

Lenders who offered the relevant loans to the relevant borrower during this period were compared in the following categories:

• Home purchase mortgage lenders:
◦ Overall – Prime borrowers
◦ Subprime and near-prime borrowers
◦ Super-Prime borrowers
◦ Large loans ($800,000 or greater)
◦ Small loans (less than $200,000)

• Mortgage refinance lenders:
◦ Overall – Prime borrowers
◦ Subprime and near-prime borrowers
◦ Super-Prime borrowers

• Unsecured person loan lenders:
◦ Overall – Prime borrowers
◦ Subprime and near-prime borrowers
◦ Super-Prime borrowers

Borrower credit status is significant because it directly effects the types of borrowers than lenders service, as well as the rates and fees they offer those customers. The credit categories are:

• Super Prime: credit score of 720 or above
• Prime: 660 or higher (inclusive of super prime)
• Near prime: 620 to 659
• Subprime: 619 or lower

Within each category, each lender was ranked on three pillars:

• Best rates offered to customers

◦ We compared the rates offered to three credit score ranges in each of the first six months of 2023 in order to balance both consumer differences in credit profiles and a changing rate environment.
◦ Each of these 18 comparisons were then averaged, and that average was scored (see below for comparison and scoring models).
◦ This looks strictly at APR, which incorporates both interest rates and fees for a more holistic sense of cost, while keeping it simple.

• Satisfaction

◦ This combines the average of two comparisons:
■ Reviews received from our customers after closing a loan, between July 2022 and June 2023. There are a few lenders for whom we do not have customer reviews, simply because customers did not respond to our requests for them. Very much a luck of the draw kind of thing, as it's not even necessarily correlated to the number of loans these lenders closed.
■ Percentage of offers that result in a closed (completed) loan. The logic here is that by completing the loan process, customers have found the terms and their interactions to be worthwhile, especially given that they often have multiple lenders to choose from through our platform.

• Availability

◦ This is strictly a comparison of the volume of offers that were made to prime borrowers on our platform in the first six months of 2023. The logic is that a lender can offer amazing rates and customer service, but it doesn't do a typical consumer much good if they're never offered one of these loans.

Each metric was first compared among lenders and then combined (averaged) where noted above. The comparison consisted of ranking each lender's value against the full range of values. These are then translated into eight star values (1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, and 5), based on which percentile the values fall into. To earn 5 stars, a metric would have to fall at or above the 87.5th percentile of all lenders for that metric; to earn 4.5 stars, a metric would have to fall between the 75th and 87.5th percentile, and so on. A metric that falls below the bottom 12.5th percentile would receive a single star, a metric that falls between the bottom 12.5th percentile and the bottom 25th percentile would receive 1.5 stars, and so on.

The comparison value of each pillar is then averaged and then that value is re-compared for a final star value.