Prosper Reports Record Month in April
Prosper has just finished its best month ever for loan originations – we have reached $20.2M in loans for April, and $500M since inception. April’s performance was achieved with the largest volume and the highest average loan amount in history with 1,969 loans and $10,277 respectively. This amount is a 34% growth over March, 2013 and 74% year over year from April, 2012.
Over the past week, many of you have asked about the changes in loan volume. We have seen two trends; first, there have been fewer B through HR rated loans available. Second, loan origination volume through Prosper’s platform has actually gone up, as you can see above. To explain these seemingly contradictory trends, I’d like to start by saying that I believe the industry has reached an inflection point. Peer-to-peer lending is increasingly accepted as a viable investment class. Both retail and institutional lenders are realizing that peer-to-peer loans represent a very interesting and potentially profitable way to obtain unprecedented access to investing in consumer loans. As a result, the industry (not just Prosper) is experiencing a spike in demand. We are aggressively ramping borrower marketing campaigns to generate more loan inventory to meet that lender demand. We are also looking closely at the borrower user experience and application process over the coming months.
All in all, these short term challenges are a positive development for the industry. As we grow, we will help more consumers get their loans funded and therefore offer our lenders more opportunities to expand their investments in consumer loans.
As I mentioned in my April update, we introduced a whole loans program in a beta period for our institutional investors. This has been going well – over $5.8M in loans originated through the whole loan pool in April. This makes up about 28% of loans originated through the platform in April and the remaining 72% originated through the fractional loan pool. On May 3rd we will officially add the whole loans pool as a permanent part of our service.
Here are some details on how it will work:
Prior to posting times, Monday thru Friday only, a subset of randomly selected loans will funnel into a whole loan pool, while all others will post normally into the standard, fractional loan pool. Those loans in the whole loan pool will remain there exclusively for a brief 45 minute period of time. If the loans are not purchased from the whole loan pool within 45 minutes, they will funnel into the fractional loan pool at regularly scheduled posting times, becoming available for funding on the standard Prosper platform. On Saturdays and Sundays all loans will funnel into the standard loan pool, giving our retail lenders the opportunity to bid on all loans available during that period.
This new process is in line with market conditions and enables us to offer whole loan buyers a solution to meeting their mandate and specifications without disrupting the retail lender experience. Additionally, for loans in the fractional loan pool, lenders will now be limited to 75% funding, ensuring that all retail lenders continue to have equal access to a large number of loan options.
Now back to April. In addition to a record month in terms of loan originations, we also made some great progress. We launched a new logo and identity. We would love to hear what you think. As promised, we increased the loan cap from $25,000 to $35,000. Many of you have noticed that this change also included removing our one year loan option. The reason for removing this is simple; one year loans are not in high demand by our borrowers. We will continue to make changes and enhancements like these to balance the needs of both lenders and borrowers.
We also welcomed back our Washington lenders. We appreciate your patience while we worked with the Securities Division of Washington’s Department of Finance to obtain approval and reopen peer-to-peer lending in Washington.
Finally, we are approaching the deadline to transfer to the new enhanced API service we introduced to our lenders back in March. The feedback on this has been tremendous and we are transitioning everyone over. The last day to transition to our new API for lenders is May 1st. If you’re interested in this, please email us at investorservices@prosper.com. If you’re already using it, great! A new password functionality in the settings section will be available in May. Stay tuned.
More exciting things are still to come over the next couple months.
- Improved collections: We are still very focused on increasing the success of our collections. We have made several changes over the past couple months to increase call intensity and work closely with delinquent borrowers. We continue to enhance this service and will keep you updated here as changes are made.
- Document Update Functionality: We have begun development on a tool that will allow our borrowers to upload documents directly to our site. This will help to streamline the borrower experience and allow our verification team to move more quickly on verification initiatives.
- Ramping Borrower Inventory: Over March and April we focused a lot of resources and attention on the lender side of our platform. This has allowed us to onboard a lot of eager lenders. As stated above, in May, we are ramping up our borrower marketing initiatives to meet these new lender needs and will be funneling more and more loans onto the platform.
We are really proud of the progress we’ve made so far, and have many more exciting updates to come as we work to make Prosper the best peer-to-peer lending platform. I’d like to thank everyone who commented on my March post for their thoughtful questions and considerate debate. I’ll be reading and responding so feel free to ask questions or add comments below.
Thank you,
Aaron Vermut
President
by Prosper on 04/30/13 |
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