Lending Club closes at $23.43 per share on the NYSE, up 56% from its IPO price

Lending Club closed at $23.43 per share, after an auspicious debut on the New York Stock Exchange this morning.

The peer-to-peer lending platform got a pop at the market open, jumping 60 percent from its announced price of $15 per share up to $24.72 per share. The price peaked at just above $25 per share, before falling and then ultimately stabilizing around $23.

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Though there has been some skepticism about the risk involved with Lending Club’s model, journalists and analysts alike can’t overlook the growth that the company has enjoyed over its seven year life span. Revenue has grown from $10.98 million in 2011 to $85.8 million in 2013, and it’s still growing, according to numbers from Forbes. In the first nine months of 2014 the company racked up $133.8 million in sales.

Lending Club’s success today builds hope for other fin-tech companies, like OnDeck Capital, which recently filed for its IPO.

“Peer-to-peer lenders and robo-advisors are poised to pop, because consumers are finally ready, and the technology finally works, and there are things like transparency that work in their favor,” Bill Doyle, Vice President and principal analyst with Forrester Research, tells VentureBeat.

He says that Lending Club’s good performance today will give the company legitimacy and the capital necessary to get consumers on board. Lending Club has had some difficulty bringing on new borrowers. Doyle cracks this up to a consumer awareness problem, one that could potentially be remedied with this burst of new money and media attention.