Last night we made another update to the Prosper site. The update includes a few nice changes for lenders and some important process changes. 

Adjust the rate on your portfolio plans

When you add a portfolio plan to your lender account, now you can adjust the average bidding rate on your portfolio plan from the “Fund your plan” page:

Just change the average bid rate, and all of the slices that make up your plan will be changed accordingly. This makes customizing your plan even easier. View your portfolio plans now.

Manual bidding guidance

As of this release, a new reminder may appear when you’re bidding on a borrower listing and the bid rate may be too low to account for the risk associated with the listing based on the estimated loss rate for similar listings. For example, if, after taking the default rate into account, you are aiming for a 6% estimated return, in most cases you would need to bid considerably more on a D listing than on a AA listing because D loans normally experience a much higher estimated loss rate and therefore you are taking on more risk. 

Here’s what the new message looks like:

You can read more on this help page.

More bankruptcy data

As foreshadowed in the May site update, we are now providing chapter and filing date information on bankruptcies filed by borrowers. If you have a loan where the borrower has filed bankruptcy, you’ll see something like this on the loan detail page:

Keep in mind that in some cases we don’t have the chapter and filing date for the borrower. In those cases, that information will not be provided in the message box.

Borrowers will now sign promissory notes for their loan

As of today, borrowers will be required to return to the Prosper site and sign the promissory notes which evidence their loan, before loan proceeds are disbursed. Until now, borrowers have not had to sign all of the notes themselves because they authorized Prosper to do so on their behalf.

Borrowers will receive an email notifying them that their loan is ready to sign, and will have 7 days to return to the site and sign the promissory notes. We will remind the borrower via email and phone calls every day until the 7 days is up, at which point, if the borrower has not responded, the loan will be cancelled.

Although this new process may add some additional time before loan funding, we expect that this change will reduce immediate loan payoffs and enhance the legal enforceability of Prosper promissory notes.

Self-employed borrower changes

Borrowers who are self-employed will now have their DTI displayed as “Not calculated”.

This is due primarily to the wide variety of business activities engaged in by self-employed borrowers, which present equally wide variations in the forms of income and tax statements often provided to verify income. As a result, income verification for self-employed borrowers is extremely difficult and time-consuming.

Additionally, the DTI of full-time, part-time, and retired borrowers who cannot verify their income will be displayed as “Not calculated”. Previously, it was displayed as “Not available”.

Stated income changes

The “Income range” field on the listing page has been renamed “Stated income”, and the stated income of every borrower will always be displayed. This includes self-employed borrowers and wage earners who indicate that they cannot document their income.

The employment section of the listing page will now look like this for self-employed borrowers:

We hope you find these changes helpful, and look forward to your feedback. If you have any requests for the next release, please leave a comment.

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Andrew is a Product Manager at Prosper.