Online lender OnDeck sees 39% IPO pop

The turbulent and potentially troubling turn in trading the past two weeks hasn't done anything to dent Wall Street's voracious appetite for online lenders.

OnDeck Capital (ONDK), which bills itself as online lending platform focused on small businesses, priced its initial public offering late Tuesday at $20 a share, above the $16-$18 range at which it had expected to sell its 10 million shares.

That might seem like a ballsy move in light of what's been happening to the stock market the past week, but OnDeck did one better at the open with a double-digit stock pop.

The New York company saw its shares jump 39% to more than $27 a share in early trading Wednesday. The stock recently traded at $27.79 a share, or 38.9% above it's IPO price.

OnDeck's surge follows last week's successful IPO of LendlingClub (LC), which also matches borrowers with lenders online. The lending platform priced 58 millions shares at $15 a piece, above the expected range of $12 to $14 a share.

On Tuesday, LendingClub added to the good news by announcing that the amount it raised in the offering jumped to $1 billion from under $900 million after the banks underwriting the deal pulled the trigger on an option to purchase an additional allotment of shares.

If demand for OnDeck is strong, its underwriters will also have the option to trigger an added 1.5 million shares. As it stands, OnDeck sold 10 million shares in its initial public offering Tuesday night at $20 a share, valuing the firm at about $1.3 billion.

OnDeck differs from LendingClub in one important way: It retains term loans, like a bank or finance company, making it subject to credit risk. LendingClub, by contrast, acts merely as the middleman between the lender and borrower.