Archive for the ‘ Prosper 3rd Party Applications ’ Category

Welcome to Prosper – the marketplace for loans —America’s only true auction- based peer-to-peer lending company. We are in a constant pursuit to ensure you can invest on the world’s most transparent and durable personal loans trading platform. Prosper delivers competitive rates of return ranging from 7.18% for AA listings to 4.59% for E Prosper Rating listings, based on return on investment for all loans as of 6/30/2009. These are healthy returns that confirm peer-to-peer lending is a viable alternative asset class in which to invest.

Individual Listings: increased layers of safety

Those of you who are returning lenders will be familiar with our bidding system on Direct Peer-to-Peer loans.

New borrowers are now required to meet the new minimum credit score requirement of 640.  They can request up to $25,000 for a three-year fixed rate loan.

Lenders can now start their bidding with $25.00 (previously $50.00) which will make it easier to create a diversified portfolio. 

Prosper has also improved its risk rating system with the introduction of a new proprietary system called Prosper Ratings ranging from AA – HR.  Each Rating represents a loss rate range. Prosper Ratings are based on historical loan performance data and are designed to better convey risk. The Prosper Rating letter grade will now be shown in the listing along with an estimated loss rate, and a narrower credit score range. Credit scores shown will be in 20 point ranges (previously 40). Click here to learn more about Prosper Ratings

You can search listings by either Prosper Rating or specific keywords. You then bid on listings of your choice—offering a great rate for both you and borrowers. Portfolio plans are also available.

Fine-Tuned Bidding for Lenders

Prosper has enhanced its auction model to include a hard bid floor for each listing. This helps our Lenders identify the absolute minimum they can bid. This is an absolute minimum: Lenders should always price for risk in order to achieve an adequate return. Remember the higher the risk, the higher your bid should be.

No matter which listings you choose to bid upon—or whether you’re a lender or borrower—you remain in control of your bid at all times. Learn more about the bid rate floor

Lenders will now be bidding on yield. The minimum bid rate is now net of the 1% servicing fee. Previously, if you bid 18% and were a winning bidder on a loan, you would receive interest at 18% and after paying a 1% servicing fee, your return on the loan would be 17%. Now, your equivalent bid would be 17%, which we call bid yield. Learn more about bidding on yield

Trade Existing Notes

With Prosper’s new Trading Platform, you can now put your Notes up for sale on our Note Trader by Folio Investing for quick and easy trades. You will be able to browse and purchase Notes there, too.

The Trading Platform will give Prosper lenders the ability to sell a Note if they need access to the funds before the full loan is paid off. It will also give Prosper lenders more investing options by giving them an opportunity to bid on loans they missed out on when the loans were first listed, or to invest in loans with durations that meet their specific investing objectives.

All loans made after July 13, 2009 are eligible to be placed on the Note Trader platform.

Prosper—Ushering in a New Financial Era

As we’ve seen, the old ways of investing and banking are broken.

Prosper offers you a different—and better—way to get competitive rates. We provide a financially and socially rewarding way to invest in our nation with unparalleled openness and transparency.

We’re firmly committed to the idea of Americans helping Americans and driving our country’s economy. Why not join us and become a financial hero today?

Finally… the moment we and so many supportive and loyal Prosper community members have been waiting for…

after nine long months of navigating the rapidly changing regulatory landscape, we are thrilled to announce that Prosper’s registration statement with the SEC has been declared effective. Continue reading Prosper is Back! (We mean it this time)

Prosper changed the way we report most severely delinquent loans from “Defaulted” and “4+ months late” to “Charge-offs” in September.

Borrowers whose loans are 91 or more days past due (DPD) will receive a “Notice of Acceleration”. The Notice of Acceleration is a warning that their loan will be accelerated in 30 days, meaning the loan will be due and payable in full. If the borrower doesn’t make a payment by the 30 day deadline, his or her loan will then be charged-off at 121 days past due.

Please note that we have added a new loan object status of  “Charge-off” to our data export to account for a new classification of loans as described in this blog post: http://blog.prosper.com/2008/09/24/site-update-%e2%80%93-september-23-2008/

The new status will start appearing in the export file by October 24th.

Please contact APIServices@prosper.com if you have any questions.

In my first blog post last week I talked about how I often share the learnings of successful lenders, as well as the teachings of the marketplace results. My job at Prosper is to show lenders how to use Prosper and its various bidding tools.  Here are a couple of other learnings to consider.

I (and the successful lenders I speak with) don’t make marginal bidding decisions. If everything looks great in a listing except that the bankcard utilization is just a tad bit higher than you’re comfortable with, or the loan amount seems too high – pass on the listing. There will undoubtedly be another listing around the corner that does meet your criteria.

How to “price” bids is another topic I frequently discuss with new (and many existing) lenders. The most common challenge lenders face initially is being outbid. This is usually due to bidding the “current rate” which in many cases isn’t competitive.

Lenders can avoid the time and frustration of being outbid by bidding an amount they are comfortable with from the beginning. That way, if they’re outbid they know that they gave it their best shot. The smart ones don’t get hooked into bidding again because it looks like a “hot” listing that everyone else is bidding on.

We have a wealth of information available in the Help section under the Lending topic.

Last, but not least, spend some time on the 3rd party applications:
             

These sites have an amazing amount of information and will certainly assist in your success on Prosper.

You can always call or email us questions. We’re here to help you.

In October 2007, Prosper launched a Facebook application for our members. In April 2008, we then launched a new Facebook application which allows people to transfer funds to their Prosper lending account instantly. We provided this service because lenders wanted a more immediate ability to bid on loans they liked without having to wait for funds to clear.

We are pleased to announce that over 5,000 members have downloaded this application!

If you are a registered lender on Prosper and have not yet installed the Facebook application, you can do so here. Once you have installed the Prosper Facebook application, you can transfer as little as $50 and as much as 50% of your loan value instantly.

Adding the Prosper Facebook application allows you to keep your friends updated on your Prosper Lending activity. And, if you want, you can display which loans listings you are watching and/or have bid on in your news feed and mini-feed sections.

If you are not a member of Facebook and are not sure about this social networking site take another look at it. There are over 36 million US users - it’s not just for students anymore! Facebook attracted over 123 million unique visitors in May, 2008. Their website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of traffic from September 2006 to September 2007 and has now increased to 5th according to Alexa.

Hundreds of applications are created everyday, and there are now 7,000 applications on the site. 

Join our 5,000 member strong base and see how easy it is to set up a page on Facebook and download our application.