Kiva refines risk assessment

wiseclerk

Social lending service Kiva has refined its risk assessment for participating MRIs (microfinance institutions). The changes and the mechanism are described here. Risks for Kiva lenders include Entrepreneur Risk, Fieldpartner Risk and County Risk. 

So far the default rate for Kiva has been 0.17% on a loan volume of $9.965.000 (4.4% of loans are one month late). When compared to Prosper.com default rates, that is an extremly good result. So far the MRI on Kiva with the worst performance is REDC Bulgaria, followed by an MRI that organizes loans to people in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Another interesting figure: The average time a listing is online at Kiva.org until it is fully funded is 1.24 days.

So far all my Kiva loans are repaying on schedule.

Zopa plans to get more personal

wiseclerk

"Prosper on Zopa" – "but better"

That is how the new Sales & Product manager Tanya Cordrey of Zopa described the planned Zopa Listings yesterday in a Zopa Chat. Quote: "It is the ability for borrowers to post listings and it gives lenders the opportunity to lend choose individuals"
Zopa plans to get this feature live next month.

The question about the chance for a secondary market was answered by that there is not enough volume yet (maybe next year). The chat was attended by many Zopa employees including the CEO. The transcript is available.

Donate $4 to sponsor a landmine sniffing rat

wiseclerk

No despite the sound of the title this is no joke. With at little as $4 you can help the quest to remove landmine. The herorat.org project trains rats to search landmines because this is a cheap and reliable way to locate landmines with little risk to the rats. While the site has a cartoon appearance this is NOT a game – read the Press centre for media coverage (e.g. CNN). I donated. 

Open rebellion of lenders in Prosper forums

wiseclerk 1 Comment

Note: Most of the following is an observation of lenders opinions voiced in the Prosper forums (with sources given). The opinions voiced in the cited threads are the opinions of the individual lenders who posted them.

Looking into the lender section at the Prosper.com forums part of the posting lenders seem to be in open rebellion. Titles of threads from the last two days include "FLASH:Prosper bans $100.000 lender", "Prosper Mng. Living Under a Rock", "Shooting the Messenger", "What happens if Prosper goes under?", "I am done lending on Prosper", "Hello Prosper Moderator", "Lender's WHO are DONE with Prosper", "My letter to Prosper", "Open letter to John Witchel" 

Topics include lack of communication from prosper, failure to adress process problems, banning lenders, closing threads, … .

Posts call for "Class Action Lawsuit", informing Venture Capital firms who funded Prosper about the situation as the lenders posting see it and the call for withrawing funds.

One main cause for the unrest are the low ROIs large long term lenders are experiencing. This post says there are 203 lenders which have loans over 6 month old and more the 25K invested. For these the post says the average estimated ROI is 1.91%.

The result is that some long time lenders churn Prosper.com and stopped investing, while new lenders continue to pour in money.

As the following chart shows the count of lenders who have bid within the last 30 days stalls since April. 


(Source)

A few lenders now express their very legative opinion on Prosper prominently in their signature in every post they make in the Prosper forums. Example

As lenders have started to make fun of Prosper employees or using avatars to create the appearance of beeing a prosper moderator without any apparent reaction of Prosper in their own forums, users start to speculate if Prosper will be forced to close the forums to avoid the negative publicity.