Owner: Prosperous Land URL:http://prosperousland.blogspot.com Join Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:42:28 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Keeping an eye on Prosper and peer to peer lending. Site statistics:Click here
Collections Follow-On Q&A With Doug Fuller 2007-10-09 13:49:00 I'm almost starting to like the guy. Doug Fuller has responded via the forums to another 20 questions (ok, a few were softballs) asked in response to his original Q&A session. It's a good read and I've picked up a few of the best questions. I encourage you to follow the whole forum thread for reactions as some are equally insightful.
1. Would you be willing to list what you have seen wrong with
Prosper's September Lending Market Summary 2007-10-09 09:39:00 Prosper released their September
market summary. Check it out for all the details.
Their noteworthy section included some interesting statistics. Apparently self-reported computer programmers are the least likely to default, followed by government workers, the nebulous analyst, and then mechanical and electrical engineers. This is a fun statistic (since I'm either a computer programmer or
Read more:Lending
, Market
, Summary
More Details On Upcoming Changes 2007-10-08 09:36:00 More details emerged over the weekend on the new Prosper features hinted at in a Yahoo financial news article and confirmed by Prosper. In addition to his Q & A with Prosperous Land, Prosper Andrew posted details to the forums and answered a few questions. The thread adds color to previously known information on the two key features: default rate estimation and a portfolio tool. In addition,
Read more:Upcoming
Prosper Confirms Upcoming Lender Features 2007-10-05 17:04:00 Earlier today I pointed to a Yahoo financial article that referred to several features that weren't currently available on the Prosper site. It turns out that these features were previewed by Prosper at the Finovate 2007 conference in NYC this last week and the Yahoo article was based on Prosper's presentation at the conference.
Prosper was kind enough to confirm the upcoming features were
Read more:Upcoming
, Lender
Prosper Sets Date For Prosper Days 2008 2007-10-05 13:07:00 Looks like the 2008 incarnation for Prosper Days will be Feb 25 - 26 in San Francisco. They're gearing it mostly toward lenders, but of course, all our welcome. Since I have no scruples, I've shameless listed the lecture schedule from their site (it's posted below). Doug Fuller, new VP of Operations, will be covering Collections and Fraud Prevention. That should be an interesting follow-up to his
Upcoming Prosper Features Hinted In Yahoo Article 2007-10-05 11:34:00 A recent Yahoo
article on online financial services may have accidentally provided hints on some upcoming Prosper features:
Prosper mined its own data to give lenders a better view of their risk. A new feature tells borrowers the historical risk of default on a specific kind of loan, such as loans to recent college grads. In addition, a new tool allows lenders to construct a portfolio of Prosper
Read more:Upcoming
, Article
Prosper's September Revenue 2007-10-05 09:32:00 Following up on last month's post documenting how Prosper makes money, I plan to keep looking at their monthly income monthly to see how they're progressing as a business. Into this month's totals. First, origination income:
Credit Grade
Loans Originated
Borrower Fee
Income
AA
$782,614
1.0%
$7,826
A
$868,698
1.0%
$8,686
B
$1,361,803
1.0%
$1,361
C
$1,138,437
1.0%
$1,138
D
$868,388
1.0%$8,683
E
Read more:September
, Revenue
Prosper Confirms New VP's Collections Experience 2007-10-04 12:27:00 Prosper has published a Q&A with the new VP of Operations Doug Fuller (Prosper Forum, Rate Ladder, Prosper Lending Review). The introduction to the Q&A confirms him as the Doug Fuller with a hefty collections and efficiency oriented background. This is the same one whose resume surfaced in the forums a little bit ago.
From the Q & A, he's confirmed that he's quite aggressive on debtors who don't
Circle Lending Puts Up Volume 2007-10-18 10:20:00 I have never paid much attention to CircleLending
because they facilitate loans between parties who have already agreed, in principle, to make the loan. In other words, they handle the bookkeeping. Virgin (of Richard Branson fame) purchased CircleLending a while back, rebranded it (Virgin Money USA), and has started a marketing push (see here, here). I have to admit that I didn't make it past
Read more:Volume
How's That Income Doing 2007-10-17 22:04:00 Back in August I observed that the borrower's income seems to weigh heavily on distress rates (late or worse). With two more months of statistics under Prosper's belt, I felt it was time to revisit this topic and see how the loans were fairing.
Income
AA
A
B
C
D
E
HR
Income > $50k
0.41%
2.34%
4.79%
4.81%
7.17%
14.13%
17.57%
Income >$25k
1.20%
1.77%
3.61%
5.10%
7.81%
11.85%
20.22%
Unstated or
More Slowing State Economies 2007-10-16 13:02:00 I'm starting to feel like Chicken Little. It looks like reports of slowing sales tax receipts from California and Georgia were the tip of the ice berg. The San Diego Union Tribune is reporting that half of the states (unlisted) are showing slowing collections.
About half of all U.S. states are collecting less from their sales taxes than expected, which could signal a recession lies ahead as the
Read more:Slowing
, State
Prosper Got Adding Bank Accounts Right 2007-10-15 13:02:00 I have to admit that it's a whole lot easier to write about things that Prosper isn't doing right. I did have one of those, "Wow, it just worked" moments last week, though. I wanted to add a new bank account for transferring around funds since we'd recently changed our primary bank (yes, you can infer that I'm still transferring money into Prosper). They were quick and I found the quick most
Read more:Accounts
, Right
Georgia Sales Slowing Down Too - Tighten Those Lending Standards 2007-10-15 09:30:00 First California sales tax receipts were dropping, and now Georgia
has reported a similar problem. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (hat tip to Calculated Risk):
Collections in Georgia were down $2.3 million in September, compared to the same period in 2006. Sales
taxes dropped 10.6 percent. For the first quarter of the fiscal year, which began July 1, overall collections are up 5 percent,
Read more:Lending
, Slowing
, Standards
Can Borrowers Eat On $100 A Month? 2007-10-21 14:10:00 There's been a running discussion on whether borrowers who claim that they spend almost nothing on month on food (see here, here, and here for recent random examples) are full of it. The credibility threshold seems to be around $100 / person. One of the examples claims $200 for a family of four. Is this doable?
The first thing to consider is that other personal finance bloggers seem to believe
Read more:Borrowers
, Month
Here A Link, There A Link, Everywhere A Link-Link 2007-10-19 15:45:00 Old McLinker had some links, E-I-E-I-O...
Visible Banking did a video interview with Chris Larson right after his Finovate presentation. Was he careful not to talk about features that may or may not be appearing in the future? You be the judge.
Peer-to-Peer Lending Offers Solution for Strapped Consumers:
A YEAR AGO, Nicole Newberry was in a financial hole so deep that she had trouble making
Is Prosper Going Flash? 2007-10-19 13:22:00 Prosper is searching for some freelance web designers in Silicon Valley. No surprises there, other than their interest in Flash
and ActionScript development experience. Prosper doesn't appear to use Flash right now (not that it's a bad thing). This may be an indicator towards a website refresh. Their site's design style is getting a bit long in the tooth, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was
Read more:Going
Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) 2007-10-26 13:45:00 At times it's a bit confusing why Prosper does some of the things it does. Laws & regulations (national or state-wide) are one of the things that ties the hands of any company in the banking world. Five Cent Nickel has done a review of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), one of the dominant pieces of legislation that limits what lenders can do to collect on loans. Some of the topics
End Of The Dryspell 2007-10-26 13:31:00 I know what you're thinking. Hey Mike, make with the posts. I mean, you were cranking out at least one a day for a while and then the dry spell hit. What gives?
I'm just mentioning that I havn't abandoned Prosperous Land. My job occasionally requires me to think hard on math problems (nonlinear audio signal processing and distortion mechanisms, if you're curious) and that I'm not very good about
Prosper's Poor Collections 2007-10-23 19:14:00 It has been an axiom that Prosper's collections need some, shall we say, improvement. I think it's important to back up this axiom with some hard data. Fortunately, Prosper provides some useful statistics for analyzing their default rate.
The easy answer is to look at their collection agency statistics. I'm only going to look at Penncro's collection information as they handle a large majority of
Distress Rate Widens For High Dollar Loans 2007-10-23 12:57:00 While doing a regular update on my personal lending tables (interest rates to charge versus various credit criteria), I noticed that the distress rate penalty for high dollar loans (>= $10k) has increased dramatically in the last two months. Distress rates refer to loans that are late in any possible way, either 15 days, 1-3 months, 4+ months, or in default.
In August, I calculated the following
Read more:Dollar
, Loans
Prosper Begins Slow Legal Road To Secondary Loan Market 2007-10-31 09:12:00 As RateLadder has already spotted, Prosper has filed a Form S-1 with the SEC. In addition, a press release from Prosper also hit the wires indicating that this is, indeed, part of the effort for a secondary market. From the press release:
Following effectiveness of the registration statement, Prosper intends to establish and maintain a secondary trading market online auction
Read more:Market
, Secondary
Lend2's Take On Prosper's Collections Handling 2007-10-30 12:30:00 Lend2 runs a fairly large group (aptly named Lend2's group) with over 200 loans to the group's name. He wrote a summary of his borrower's feedback regarding the collections process:
The Penncro collectors are really "mean." Several people independently used this same word to describe them. Some have asked if there's someone else they can talk to about their loans. I've re-directed them to
Read more:Handling
Big Prosper Upgrade Goes Live 2007-10-30 09:56:00 Prosper's downtime last night brought several upgrades. This includes the unspeakable upgrades like portfolios and estimated default rates. I'll walk through the upgrades later in more detail, but for the moment, here's the highlights:
Estimated default rate is shown and a ROI calculator estimates the return for a given interest rate.Bidding portfolios are now activeTweaks with the standing order
Another Way To Monitor Prosper Collections 2007-10-29 12:48:00 In a previous post, I looked at Prosper's pro-offered collections statistics. There is another way to look at their collections, however, that has the potential to identify quickly changing trends in Prosper's collections department. This will be useful if the new VP of Operations walks the walk from his talking the talk.
To do this, lets look at the life-cycle for a late loan. When a borrower
Read more:Monitor
Prosper Warning For Low ROI & Prosperous Land Competition 2007-11-05 08:30:00 With the last feature upgrade, Prosper has added a ROI calculator that will estimate the average return for certain classes of loans. It helps lenders to estimate how much risk they're taking on, and prevents people from complaining that they didn't know what they were getting into. And, if you proceed anyway, Prosper has added a big warning that you're doing something that is not recommended.
Revenge Of Linkfest 2007-11-03 09:19:00 RateLadder looks at thin slices of loans:
However, I would caution lender to think for themselves a little bit. Speaking as one who has analyzed a bunch of Prosper data if you sliced the current loan data into 54 equal segments (see graph at the bottom of the page) you start to get some mighty fine segments. There are currently 15,832 loans on Prosper. 15,832 / 54 = 293 per segment assuming
Read more:Revenge
Update On Prosper's Collection Effectiveness 2007-11-02 15:31:00 As I mentioned in a previous blog post, one way to gauge the effectiveness of collections is to look at how delinquent age. If a loan is one month late, in a month it will either be brought current or it will be two months late. From this, we can get near real-time updates on whether Prosper's attempts to improve collections are working.
And on that note, we now have Nov 1 statistics to add to
Read more:Update
P2P Lending Featured On NPR's Morning Edition 2007-11-02 09:39:00 P2P lending got featured during this morning's rush-hour NPR coverage during MorningEdition
. Prosper was promoted prominently. It was a little rosy compared to actually lending on Prosper, but was interesting none the less. I was amused that I had seen the listing they referred to in the piece just a day or two ago. Head over to NPR if you want a listen.
America is known as a nation of
Read more:Lending
, Featured
Prosper Violating Lender Registration Agreement? 2007-11-01 10:08:00 traveler505 has done some great research that suggests that Prosper is violating their agreement with lenders. It's a long read (at least by blog standards), but he's got a solid collection of facts backing him up.
Because the LenderAgreement
specifically precludes Prosper from deducting Servicing Fees and Group Leader Fees from payments made more than 30 days after the due date, and because
Read more:Registration
Prosper To Give Quarterly Collections Update? 2007-11-01 09:48:00 Prosper Shira has hinted that there'll be quarterly collections updates from Doug Fuller.
Thanks for this post. There is important feedback in here that I'll make sure Doug Fuller sees.
As a reminder, Doug plans to update the community on Collections progress on a quarterly basis. You can also catch him live at Prosper Days 2008 in February in San Francisco.
Shira
This could be interesting
Read more:Update
, Quarterly
Recommend Site To A Friend
