The site Prosper.com shows only a maintenance note today saying “… We expect the site to be down both Saturday (4/25/2009) and Sunday (4/26/2009).”.
Speculation: Maybe Prosper will end its quiet period and resume its full p2p lending service on Monday?
Lending Club reintroduces the possibility for everyone to download the data of the loans as .csv or .xml file. This feature was temporarily removed in March due to privacy concerns. Lending Club says a few data points that compromised borrowers identity have been removed.
Peer to peer lending is innovative and new. New users usually have lots of questions when grasping the marketplace mechanisms. Beyond the FAQ of the p2p lending service, a great place to learn is usually a forum, where users (mostly lenders) exchange experiences and post and answer questions.
There are “official” forums provided by the lending services and independent ones. One of the first ones, the official Prosper forum, became one of the most notorious ones. After Prosper “moderated” negative and critical posts it later deleted the initial forum in total. When a copied version of the forum’s archive was made available on seperate internet site Prosper tried to shut the site down, but failed.
But this is an extreme example. I found that on nearly all other forums a very helpful and supportive attitude rules.
List of p2p lending forums
General
Focus on one p2p lending service
If I have missed any great p2p lending forum, please comment with the URL and I will add it to the above list. Thank you.
(Photo credit: wili_hybrid)
P2P lending service Lending Club, today announced the availability of the first Self-Directed Individual Retirement Account to enable investments in peer lending. EntrustCAMA, part of the Entrust Group, serves as the administrator for these accounts.
This new Self-Directed IRA investment choice gives individuals the ability to build a portfolio of Lending Club notes and hold that portfolio in a tax-free or tax-deferred account. To meet the Federal deadline for this tax season, applications must be completed online, printed and postmarked before April 15, 2009. The account application is available at https://www.lendingclub.com/sdIRA/registerIRA.action
Key benefits stated:
Fees:
Sources: press release, Lending Club website
Lending Club announced today that they have closed another funding round. Excerpt from the press release:
… closed a $12 million Series B round of funding. Morgenthaler Ventures led the round and is joined by existing investors, Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners. Rebecca Lynn, a Morgenthaler Principal, is joining Lending Club’s board of directors.
Lending Club also announced today that it has added Pamela Kramer as Chief Marketing Officer. Ms. Kramer is an established marketing veteran … . She was most recently Chief Marketing Officer of MarketTools, Inc and, before that, spent 9 years in leadership roles with E*TRADE Financial … .
As P2Plendingnews.com has researched Lending Club has invested 2.4 million US$ of its own money to fund loans since the relaunch in last October. The total volume of funded loans is approx. 10 million US$, that means that Lending Club funded about 24% of all loans itself.
The data is from weekly sales reports that Lending Club files with the SEC. The sales reports look like this and give details on each loan funded.
More details and numbers in the article (recommended reading) by P2Plendingnews.com.
While this may be contrary to the “pure” idea of peer to peer lending my take on this is:
Please share your opinion by commenting here or in the Lending Club forum. Thank you.
Recently I noticed two changes on p2p lender’s Lending Club website.
On the statistics page the link to download the loan data was removed. Before it was possible to download the complete loan data since inception of the service. Furthermore the predefined setting for the parameter “Loans issued from” is set on March 1,2008 now. That means, if you look on the page and do not change that parameter manually you see how loans performed that were issued between March 1, 2008 and today. Older loans issued between June 1, 2007 and Feb 29, 2008 are not included in the displayed results.
When I noticed that, I was reminded of what Prosper did with it’s statistics. Prosper segmented it’s loans (e.g. prosper select index) and cited only results for better performing segments in press releases. Furthermore the predefined values on Prosper’s statistic page, were set in a way that lowered the late payments and default ratios compared to an average over all Prosper loans.
But Lending Club had successfully positioned itself with transparency a core value in the past, so I asked Lending Club to comment on the reasons for the changes.
Rob Garcia, Director Product Strategy told P2P-Banking.com:
This is a temporary situation. We chose to take down the files due to privacy concerns raised by our customers. We are working to address these concerns in a way that continues to provide full transparency to platform data, while protecting the privacy of our customers….
On the setting of the parameter he stated:
The default setting for the statistics page is a year. So since we are now in March, the “From” date is defaulted to March 2008. This is to show the most relevant annualized indicators for the last year. Users can then change the “From” and “To” dates to explore the indicators for a specific time frame they may be interested in, including from inception (June 1, 2007). We did this based on numerous email inquiries from lenders asking for annual default rates instead of a general default rate since inception (so that they can compare annual defaults to annual interest rates to get actual net returns). We’re looking at tools to make that calculation easier…
Yesterday Lazy Man wrote about his observations on how Lending Club reports risk. The posted screenshots show that interpretation of the risk figures is not obvious under certain circumstances.
When analysing numbers on p2p lending activity, users can rely on independent third party sites gathering statistics for many p2p lending services. These services either obtain the raw data via an interface provided by the service or they do parse the web pages of the service to collect the data.
Most of the statistic sites offer reports and tools to analyse and graph the overall development of the marketplace as well as the status of an individual lender’s investments.
The majority of the users are lenders, as the borrower usually needs the information only once - before applying for a loan - to determine what interest rate is appropriate.
Tools for Prosper:
Tools for Lending Club:
Tools for MyC4:
Tools for Zopa UK:
Tools for Smava:
Tools for Auxmoney:
Tools for Boober NL:
Feel free to copy this list, but please do set a link citing this page as source. If you know another social lending / p2p lending stats site, please let me know.
Long term readers may remember that the Wiseclerk.com domain initially started as a report site on Prosper.com. It was in fact together with Savagenumber.com the first service of this kind.
(Photo credit: ArtemFinland)
It has been said before - there might have been no better time to establish p2p lending. With the established system shaken and many consumers not getting loans as easily as before the market environment is good for peer-to-peer lending.
P2P lending gets good media attention. The Uncrunch.org initiative (in which Lending Club takes part) in the Change.org vote for new ideas finished in the Top 15.
On the demand site all p2p lending companies benefit from the crisis. On the supply site, in my opinion the effect is mostly positive too, but some lenders are hesitant to invest their money in a new, innovative model and rather seek a save haven for it.
P2P lending sites that have demonstrated low default rates over a longer time and therefore low risk fared best - especially at Zopa UK supply rose strongly lately.
Bonmot from Spanish Comunitae:
Pues no sabemos si la crisis es buena para Comunitae, pero de lo que no cabe duda es de que Comunitae es buena para la crisis.
Translates to: “Well, we do not know if the crisis is good for Comunitae, but what is certain is that Comunitae is good for the crisis.”
As the end of 2008 approaches here is a look back on the highlights of peer to peer lending news in 2008:
Latest p2p lending discussion
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