Prosper.com now makes the link between loans and listings available. With this new feature now everyone can see the status of the loan payments of every borrower. On the borrower profile page there is now a "Loans" tab:
Previously only lenders invested in a loan could directly see, which status it had. All others had to use 3rd party tools like Wiseclerk.com. Those had to program their own matching algorithms since no key matching loans to listings was published by Prosper.
Prosper has always been the p2p lending service that made most data available about its market.
I will have to look into which parts of Wiseclerk.com I need to rebuild to make use of the new information linking listings to loans.
Further improvements that Prosper announced include reporting to Transunion and enabling borrowers to repay directly using money in their Prosper account.
Tuesday I wrote about Zopa's plans for Zopa listings. Now a preview of how the new Zopa listings will look is available. With this feature Zopa will take the step from anonymous borrowers to a more personal look with borrower listings and profiles. To create a listing borrowers will have a credit grade of at least C.
I looked at the preview today and found the resemblance to Prosper.com layout striking in many points. The listing overview will look like this:
The loan listing itself has photos, a loan details section, a personal profile section and borrower information. Furthermore it will have a Questions and Answers Section allowing the lender to ask questions. Looking at the following example the forecast graph in the upper right looks exactly like the same feature Prosper offers:
The 8 page preview description gives more example screens of Zopa listings, which Zopa says it will introduce within the next months.
With this changes, should the Prosper & Zopa merger that Jeff & Heather wish (it is really only wishful thinking!) ever happen, then at least the layout question seems decided now.
That is how the new Sales & Product manager Tanya Cordrey of Zopa described the planned Zopa Listings yesterday in a Zopa Chat. Quote: "It is the ability for borrowers to post listings and it gives lenders the opportunity to lend choose individuals" Zopa plans to get this feature live next month.
The question about the chance for a secondary market was answered by that there is not enough volume yet (maybe next year). The chat was attended by many Zopa employees including the CEO. The transcript is available.
Note: Most of the following is an observation of lenders opinions voiced in the Prosper forums (with sources given). The opinions voiced in the cited threads are the opinions of the individual lenders who posted them.
Topics include lack of communication from prosper, failure to adress process problems, banning lenders, closing threads, … .
Posts call for "Class Action Lawsuit", informing Venture Capital firms who funded Prosper about the situation as the lenders posting see it and the call for withrawing funds.
One main cause for the unrest are the low ROIs large long term lenders are experiencing. This post says there are 203 lenders which have loans over 6 month old and more the 25K invested. For these the post says the average estimated ROI is 1.91%.
The result is that some long time lenders churn Prosper.com and stopped investing, while new lenders continue to pour in money.
As the following chart shows the count of lenders who have bid within the last 30 days stalls since April.
The automatic diversification mechanism LendingMatch can now be used with as little as $500. LendingMatch uses the $500 to build a portfolio of 25 different loans
claims usability improvements on referral program, that pays $5 for successful invitations
