Overview
Borrowers request personal loans on Prosper and investors (individual or institutional) can fund anywhere from $25 to $25,000 per loan request. Prosper handles the aggregation and disbursement of funds to borrowers and then services the loans, collecting and distributing payments and interest back to the loan investors.
For most of its history, 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.
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 one, 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.
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.
Prosper opened to the public on February 5, 2006. Prosper was founded by Chris Larsen (the founder of E-loan) and John Witchel and is backed by 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 CapitalOne co-founder Nigel Morris).
Read more about this topic: Prosper Marketplace