Eric's Credit Community

Lest everyone think I've been completely slacking off over the last few months, I have a few new reports and site updates to mention.

I just published the new Lates By Payment report. This report should give you an idea of how default risk changes as a loan ages. We would of course expect that as more and more on-time payments are made, the risk of a loan defaulting decreases. The information on this report should help to quantify that effect with real numbers. I'm especially excited about the possibilities this has for improving return estimates for portfolios and for pricing loans in a secondary market (such as the one LendingClub.com uses, or the one Prosper is rumored to be working on.)

Over the last couple months, I also put out a few other site changes that I've neglected to announce here (call me lazy I guess). Member pages now have an "Endorsements" tab so you can see who is endorsing whom, as well as endorsement history when endorsements are withdrawn. I've also updated the lates by age report to include a 30 month late category. We are finally getting close to actually having some "fully aged" 36 month loans out there!

It's been a while, but I have a few updates here. First, I've added a Map function to the lender data screens that will show a kind of "heat map" for which states you are lending to. Not extremely useful, but a neat curiosity anyways. Second, I finally added a real blog to the site. I'll try to post there regularly to answer some of the frequently asked questions I see in my inbox as well as to opine on whatever else I might find interesting. Finally, there are a couple of bug fixes with this release, mostly related to a new "Pending Completion" listing status that Prosper rolled out recently. This has been causing some listings to fail to load, so that should be good for keeping things up-to-date.

Check out the new Lender Return Distribution report to see a nice "big picture" view of how lenders are doing on Prosper. I've provided quite a few customization options on this one as well to allow you to slice-n-dice the data in many different ways.

I apologize for the lack of data updates recently - apparently I had a misconfigured server that was causing the update process to fail. It should be fixed now though and all the data should be back up to date by tomorrow morning.

You can now sign up to be notified when one of your borrowers tries to get a second loan. This is a feature that many of you have asked for ever since Prosper allowed borrowers to take out second loans before paying off their first one. All you need to do is sign in and check the Notify me when a borrower I've lent to asks for another loan. box on the My Account screen and you will automatically be notified within an hour or two after the borrower's loan request is posted on Prosper.

Well, it's been almost 2 years now, and I've finally gotten around to re-vamping the look and feel for the site. As much as I enjoyed the craigslist-style simplicity of the old design, it was overdue for a bit of an update. You may notice that many of the page names on the site have changed as well, but any links you might have to the old pages should be redirected to the new ones automagically.

Along with the design update, I have a laundry list of improvements to the site as well:

• I've replaced the old "Find a lender" box with the new search bar you see under the tabs. You can now search for lenders, groups, or listings by title or borrower right from there.
• The Loan Search & Analysis tool now has a "lender" option to search for loans by lender. You can also do lender "What-if" searches from there, or you can follow the new links from a lender's loan and what if pages to view the loan and what-if analysis.
• The Group Promotion tool has been fixed. The previous version didn't work very well because of security precautions in most browsers that disallow cross-site scripting. The new code for that tool should resolve this.
• Lender signature image backgrounds are now transparent. Now they should blend in with the background color of the website you display them on rather than showing up as a white box.
• I've added the new Listing Category field to the Borrower Segments report. So, you can now see stats by listing category (personal loans, business loans, debt consolidation, etc.) All the data there is still pretty new though, so don't read too much into what you see there yet.
• I've improved the lender "what-if" screen to separate it out into multiple pages for larger lenders. It should also be significantly faster now as well.
• I've added a new Links area with links to a few other great p2p lending resources and blogs
• I've updated the Borrower Segments report to include average loan age for each segment. This should help with understanding the significance of the late rate figures there.

I'm sure I missed a few things in that list, but that should capture the majority of the changes for this release. Hope you enjoy the new site!

Inspired by a report maintained manually by Prosper lender Fred93 I've created a new Loan Aging report. This report shows how loans from each month have performed after 6 months of aging. I'll be adding more options for customization on this report in the future as well.