Monday, February 25, 2008

Prosper Days 2008: Keynote from CEO Chris Larsen

Here are a few notes from Chris Larsen's Prosper Days keynote address.

  • Prosper provides strong loyalty and strong diversification
  • Shared several success stories of prosper loans (Soldier loan consolidation, loan for a toy business, super prime home improvement loan, charity loan for needy family, and a loan from a friend)
  • Prosper can improve borrower's credit
  • Prosper is growing - $120,000,000 in loans and 600,000 registered members
  • As he has mentioned before, lenders are avoiding subprime loans; in January 2007 subprime loans represented 24% of loans and in January 2008 they made up 5% of loans
  • "Attractive" ROI loans up nearly 200%
  • Prosper started giving rate guidance to borrowers and added rate tools for lenders
  • Prosper now warns bidders when they are likely to get a low estimated return
  • Portfolio plans were introduced this year
  • Rate guidance to borrowers has significantly reduced the number of borrowers requesting "low ROI" loans and increase the "attractive ROI" listings by 250%
  • Borrower requested features: schedule a date for a future payment, save listing draft to finish later, preview listing, re-use listing as template, pay loan with lending balance, have two active loans
  • Lender requested features: watch list, instant transfers, better guidance on manual bidding, addition of loan categories, show community payments on group, add "4+ months late" loan status, show history of second borrowers, instant transfers, 1099's on a single statement, increase max rate to 35%
  • Prosper opened a new forum and now has an official blog
  • Social capital - impact of groups on default rates; small groups do better than large groups
  • Endorsements from friends improved performance and rates
  • Collections improved - $34,665 collected in August 2007 and $69,807 in January 2008
  • Fraud prevention - first conviction for fraud
  • New feature - portfolio plans can be created and shared
  • Looking ahead - More lender control (tools, transparency, secondary market), growing attractive listings, credit crunch is an opportunity

Update: There was lots of blog and news coverage of the conference - ABC 7 was also there.

1 comment:

Judith Lautner said...

Good summary. I also posted about Prosper Days in my blog - five posts that can be found at http://fightdebt.blogspot.com/search/label/Prosper%20Days

I am glad I found your blog while putting together these posts, and expect to check it often now. My knowledge of how Prosper works was expanded significantly by my attendance at Prosper Days but I find there is a lot yet to discover.

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