New Prosper Features
Prosper just sent out a newsletter with some new features that they’ve been running with for a while. If you want to know a bit more you can check out their site or my previous articles on starting, saving time and cancellations.
One key feature is the group rating. It attempts to provide a summary of the success of the group at avoiding the delinquency. So far I haven’t found groups very useful in deciding when to lend or not. The only time I’ve found them useful is when they save me the legwork of validating documents for risky loans. Unfortunately it seems like most group leaders are doing minimal vetting. I’ll be keeping an eye on this feature and I think it will serve as indicator of the group’s meaningfulness. Presumably an average group is not doing much vetting. A below average group is doing a bad job of vetting and an above average group is doing a good job of vetting. I can defiantly see this helping me make a call for or against a loan in a close case.
Another promising feature is the new account statements. It seems like both the detail and readability of the statements has improved.
Prosper has a lot of room for improvement but I must say I’m encouraged to see that there is a fairly frequent stream of improvements.