Last night we did one of the biggest releases of code to the Prosper site that we’ve ever done. What? You didn’t notice anything? Perfect.

One of the less glamorous sides to building web sites (or building anything, come to think of it) is that sometimes you have to stop working on the sizzle and get working on the steak. To use another analogy, someone had to frame up the canvas before Picasso could start laying down paint.

So this release is largely behind the scenes. If you’ve gotten this far, you might like to know what a few of those improvements are, so here goes…

Institutional lenders

One of the few visible changes to the site is to add an improved interface for our institutional lenders. Since the site launched over two years ago, we have had a handful of institutional lenders (hedge funds, money managers, etc.) participating on the platform. In this release we improved the account infrastructure that allows us to support institutional lenders, and hope to have many join our lender community. From the outside, however, you won’t see any differences - institutional lenders won’t appear differently than individual lenders. If you are an institutional lender who would like to participate in Prosper, please get in touch.

Credit reporting

As you probably know, Prosper reports borrower payment activity (and inactivity) to Experian and TransUnion on a monthly basis. This is important both for improving (or negatively affecting, as the case may be) borrower’s credit histories, and also for establishing Prosper as a mainstream credit provider. Our new code automates more details, which will help us continue to report accurately and in a timely manner  every month, as the volume of payment activity increases.

Bankruptcy tracking

As of this release, we’re automating more of our bankruptcy tracking to set the stage for us to be able to start giving lenders the bankruptcy chapter number and filing date in the future.

Loan originations

We’ve also made some back-office improvements to our data handling process that should help us avoid delays in the pre-funding verification process.

We hope you enjoy the changes and hardly notice a thing. If you have any requests for the next release, please leave a comment.

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Andrew is a Product Manager at Prosper.