| By Jim Bruene on July 13, 2009 6:48 PM | Comments (1) |
At our FinovateStartup conference two months ago, Prosper won a Best of Show award for the re-launch of its peer-to-peer lending platform. But apparently, the SEC didn't share our audience's enthusiasm over Prosper's plan to operate under State of California regulatory authority while its SEC filings were undergoing final scrutiny. So Prosper went offline again, waiting until today at 5:30 PM Pacific to reopen (note 1).
The company can now set aside the last nine months of regulatory servitude and pursue its vision: allowing loans to be originated online in an auction process. Sure, thousands of pages of Prosper documentation are now on file at the SEC, with thousands more on the way, and lenders (aka investors) must now meet various state-mandated "investor suitability" requirements (note 2). But fundamentally, it's the same peer-to-peer lending service the company introduced in 2006, albeit with hundreds of incremental improvements (note 3).
The latest version launched today includes a number of tweaks that include a higher minimum credit score (640), new risk ratings, and lower minimum bid amount ($25), but the only major changes are:
- A secondary market is now available for lenders to sell their previously originated loans
- A hard rate floor that establishes a minimum yield for loans. It varies by credit score and is determined by adding the current 3-year national CD rate to the expected loss rate of the loan. For example, a C-rated loan with a 6% loss rate now has a floor of approximately 8.3% (6% + 2.3%). The vast majority of loans would have been originated at rates above the floor anyway, so the impact should be small.
- Because each individual state must now approve lending/investing at Prosper, only 14 are currently on board: California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. More states will be added in the weeks and months ahead. Borrowing is permitted in all states except Iowa, Kansas, Maine and North Dakota.
On hold is the planned option to allow institutional lenders to post already-originated loans directly into the marketplace (Open Market), see previous post.
To support the grand re-opening, CEO Chris Larsen penned a blog post entitled: Prosper is Back! (We mean it this time) which features a humorous YouTube clip of him asking his dad to post a loan listing on Prosper (embedded below). It's good to see they've maintained a sense of humor.
Prosper homepage minutes after its 5:30 PM Pacific relaunch (13 July 2009)
Notes:
1. The SEC approved the Prosper filings Friday afternoon, 10 July 2009.
2. Investor suitability requirements may involve one or more of the following: minimum net worth, minimum annual income, maximum investment as a percent of net worth.
3. For more on the P2P loan marketplace, see our Online Banking Report on Peer-to-Peer Lending (published Dec. 2007).
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It should be noted that lenders can only new loans (purchased post-Jul 2009 relaunch) on the secondary market. It would have been great for lenders to be able to sell the $94 million or so in active loans that they're already holding, but the SEC must have nixed that idea.