P2P-Banking.com

When analysing Prosper.com data it is possible to find out all kind of things. E.g if there are regional differences to how talkative Prosper borrowers are when writing listings.

Prosper's most talkative borrowers live in:

as compared to:

Now, while that was fun, it is not really useful in any way or is it?

When looking at the length of funded listings, that became loans, by credit grade it gets more interesting.

Apparently the lower the credit grade the more detailed the description has to be to convince the lenders to bid to fund the loan.

Looking at the development of the description length of funded Prosper listings on the time scale  this chart is the result:

There are several possible causes that contribute to listings getting lenghtier:

• Borrowers take other listings as example and add on top of this
• Group leaders (or others) provide templates
• Competition for lender attention is getting tougher
• Borrowers detected that longer descriptions will increase chances (see HRs in table above) - unlikely

Suggestions?

Prosper.com now makes the link between loans and listings available. With this new feature now everyone can see the status of the loan payments of every borrower. On the borrower profile page there is now a "Loans" tab:

Previously only lenders invested in a loan could directly see, which status it had. All others had to use 3rd party tools like Wiseclerk.com. Those had to program their own matching algorithms since no key matching loans to listings was published by Prosper.

Prosper has always been the p2p lending service that made most data available about its market.

I will have to look into which parts of Wiseclerk.com I need to rebuild to make use of the new information linking listings to loans.

Further improvements that Prosper announced include reporting to Transunion and enabling borrowers to repay directly using money in their Prosper account.