P2P-Banking.com

The Prosper study I featured yesterday lists the Prosper fees. While it does not attempt to calculate the revenues of Prosper.com it gives some indications regarding the operating costs:

According to Mendelson (2006), the primary costs of Prosper consist of …, (2) a $4 fee for identity authentication, credit pulling, and bank-account setup per active borrower, (3) customer service at the average rate of four interactions per loan and $2 per interaction, and (4) a fixed overhead cost of approximately $3 million per year. …

Given these estimates, it is difficult to measure Prosper accounting in precision. However, there is no doubt that Prosper’s revenue does not cover its full cost (as of February 2008). The difference is met by a large stock of venture capital.

Regarding the Prosper revenues, Mike did a calculation estimating the November 2007 revenues at 114,000 US$. If this is correct, it did not even cover fixed overhead.

Prosper changed fees since that last calculation.

Zopa UK has announced that it will remove the options to lend for 12, 24 or 48 months and concentrate on lending terms of 36 and 60 months. The changes apply only to money lend through Zopa markets not to Zopa listings.

Why are we making these changes?
- Since Zopa began more than three years ago, more than 95% of your loans have been taken for a period of 3 years or less.
- The popularity of larger loans repaid over 5 years is increasing, particularly since we introduced the new fixed borrower fee.
- Almost half of our new lenders who sign up to Zopa do not become active and our hypothesis is that it is just too time consuming for them to make offers to all of our markets.
- This allows us to simplify the marketplace considerably, while still allowing borrowers to repay their loan early with no penalty.
- Because listings still enables all loan terms from 1 to 5 years, Zopa will continue to offer a wide variety of borrowing and lending options.
- By structuring repayments over at least 36 months, we aim to encourage fewer borrowers to repay their loan early, maximising the interest you earn from each loan and reducing the period your money might spend in your holding account. This is because the loans that have been repaid early to date were mostly taken for 12 and 24 months in the first instance, so that borrowers had paid back a good proportion of their loan after just a few months.
- We’re not envisaging that there will be any significant financial impact for Zopa from these changes. At most, we would earn 0.5% of the outstanding capital for a little longer if we can dissuade early repayment, but since we would hope that lenders would relend any funds repaid early anyway, we’re unlikely to earn anything more significant. These changes are purely aimed at simplifying our offer.

Lender reactions in the forums (19 pages of comments) are mostly negative.
Some lenders speculate that this move is a necessary result of the new flat fee which was introduced earlier. Borrowers pay 94.25 GBP of the loan amount. For short term loans the impact of this fee on the APR is higher then for long term loans. 

Effective today Prosper.com has raised the closing fees for borrowers:

…The rationale behind this increase is to enable us to better cover our administrative costs and bring our fees more in line with the market. We have endeavored to continue to keep the fees very straightforward for our borrowers.

The origination fee schedule for borrowers of first and second loans will be as follows:

AA 1.00% (no change)
A 2.00%
B 2.00%
C 3.00%
D 3.00%
E 3.00%
HR 3.00%

…

Origination fees paid by existing borrowers and for listings that have already been created will not be impacted.

Prosper.com announced that it will discontinue group fees in the near future for all new loans. Group fees, also called Group leader rewards or Group rewards allowed the group leader to charge a fee that is payed by borrowers with loans in this group.

The announcement:

At Prosper, we have been listening to your feedback regarding groups and group leader rewards.

The original philosophy behind Prosper Groups was to enable borrowers in close-knit communities to leverage the reputation and peer pressure of their group to attract more bids from lenders, resulting in potentially lower interest rates for borrowers, and lower default rates for lenders. We have found, after nearly two years of experience, that the strongest groups are comprised of close networks of friends and associates, where compensation is not the dominant motivation for the group leader’s services.

As a result, we are making changes to Prosper Groups. In the next month, Prosper will discontinue payment rewards on new loans for group leaders. Group leaders will continue to earn payment rewards on all eligible loans originating before the change. Group leaders can also receive referral rewards for referring borrowers or lenders to Prosper under our Referral Program.

We hope this change will encourage group leaders to grow their groups by inviting new members from their pre-existing social networks, turning Prosper Groups into a more powerful community development tool and making Prosper simpler for both borrowers and lenders.

For more details on these changes, please visit our Group Changes Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

Thank you for helping us become the Internet’s leading community lending site.

The original idea of the Prosper groups was, that social connections, that already existed offline, would be replicated within the Prosper group structure.
But most groups evolved online only with no previous offline connections between the members. The (the lack of) value of the groups for the Prosper concept has been discussed repeatedly in the Prosper forum. While some group leaders did a good job screening and vetting borrower applications and the group leader could be seen as a compensation for time invested; the majority of lenders seems to see the removal of group fees as a step in the right direction.