Prosper Marketplace, Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based financial services company. Prosper Funding LLC, one of its subsidiaries, operates Prosper.com, a website where individuals can request to borrow money, open a credit card, or invest in personal loans.
Overview
Prosper Marketplace is America's first peer-to-peer lending marketplace, with over $23 billion in funded loans. Borrowers request personal loans on Prosper and investors (individual or institutional) can fund anywhere from $2,000 to $50,000 per loan request. Investors can consider borrowers’ credit scores, ratings, and histories and the category of the loan. Prosper handles the servicing of the loan and collects and distributes borrower payments and interest back to the loan investors.
Prosper verifies borrowers' identities and select personal data before funding loans and manages all stages of loan servicing. Prosper's unsecured personal loans are fully amortized over a period of three or five years, with no pre-payment penalties. Prosper generates revenue by collecting a one-time fee on funded loans from borrowers and assessing an annual loan servicing fee to investors.
From 2006 to 2009, Prosper operated a variable rate model. Prosper acted as an eBay-style online auction marketplace, with lenders and borrowers ultimately determining loan rates using a Dutch auction-like system. Effective December 19, 2010, Prosper filed a new prospectus with the SEC, changing its business model to use pre-set rates determined solely by Prosper based on a formula evaluating each prospective borrower's credit risk. Under the new approach, lenders no longer determine the loan rate via price discovery in an auction. Instead, they simply choose whether or not to invest at the rate which Prosper's loan pricing algorithm assigns to the loan after it analyzes the borrower's credit report and financial information.
The idea for the service is derived from group banking concepts, such as rotating savings and credit associations. Other motivating ideas derive from the concepts of microlending and microfinance.
Prosper publishes performance statistics on its website and all market data is available to the public for analysis. All transactions are in US dollars; lenders and borrowers must be US residents. Prosper's 10.69% annualized seasoned rate of return, net of fees, for the period of July 1, 2009 through September 30, 2011 was independently audited by Ashland Partners & Company LLP in December 2011.
In 2016, Prosper Marketplace unveiled Prosper Daily, a mobile app. The app is designed to give consumers tools to make financial decisions, including viewing all their financial accounts in one place, budgeting and tracking spending by category, identifying questionable charges, and monitoring their free credit score, which is updated monthly.
Prosper opened to the public on February 5, 2006, and was founded by Chris Larsen (the founder of E-loan) and John Witchel. Prosper is backed by BlackRock, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Agilus Ventures, Benchmark Capital, CrossLink Capital, DAG Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Fidelity Ventures, Omidyar Network (an investment vehicle of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar), Meritech Capital Partners, TomorrowVentures (an investment vehicle of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt), and QED Investors (an investment vehicle of Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris).
Evaluation of credit risk
Prosper has provided an increasing amount of information about prospective borrowers over time, while also making various changes to its credit policy. Prior to its 2008 'quiet period' and 2009 SEC registration, the company provided "Credit Grades" and other credit information about its prospective lenders. Following the SEC registration, the company created a new model that determined "Prosper Ratings" instead. Additionally, new prospective borrowers were required to have an FICO 8 credit score of at least 640, while returning borrowers only need a score of 600 to request a loan.
Prosper Ratings
Since its SEC registration in 2009, Prosper has provided a proprietary "Prosper Rating" for prospective borrowers based on the company's estimation of that borrower's "estimated loss rate." According to the company, that figure is "determined by two scores: (1) the credit score, obtained from an official credit reporting agency, and (2) the Prosper Score, figured in-house based on the Prosper population." Prosper Ratings, from lowest-risk to highest-risk, are labeled AA, A, B, C, D, E, and HR ("High Risk").