In a SEC filing of yesterday, the SEC has ordered Prosper to cease and desist. On page two it states that
The loan notes issued by Prosper pursuant to this platform are securities and Prosper, from approximately January 2006 through October 14, 2008, violated Sections 5(a) and (c) of the Securities Act, which prohibit the offer or sale of securities without an effective registration statement or a valid exemption from registration.
From page six:
In view of the foregoing, the Commission deems it appropriate to impose the sanctions agreed to in Respondent Prosper’s Offer. Accordingly, it is hereby ORDERED that: Pursuant to Section 8A of the Securities Act, Respondent Prosper cease and desist from committing or causing any violations and any future violations of Sections 5(a) and (c) of the Securities Act.
So far Prosper has not commented on the situation.
If you’re a borrower seeking a loan, you will still be able to create a new loan listing, which we will endeavor to fulfill through alternative sources.
The way this works is that Prosper refers loan applicants to other lending companies. After answering a few questions, borrowers seeking a loan a channeled to Firstagain, Lendingtree, Freedomfinancialnetwork or Creditkarma (and potentially others – the mentioned ones are the ones I was shown).
Should a borrower use the services of one of the linked companies then Prosper is paid a referral fee.
However apparently not all visitors of the site seem to be redirected. Potentially members or former users with cookies are not shown these options.
One of the downsides of p2p lending service Prosper.com are high default rates. Results from collection attempts are low.
In an attempt to test alternatives to the existing collection process Prosper in January selected 66 cases of nonpaying borrowers and turned them over to the law firm Hunt & Henriques to pursue these cases in court.
Fred 93, one of the lenders on these loans researched the status of the court cases himself, dissatisfied that Prosper did not inform him on the status, which he says Prosper initially promised to do monthly.
According to Fred93’s findings, Prosper.com so far lost 6 cases and won 1 case.
P2P lending is spreading internationally. While the biggest loan volumes are generated in the US market, many p2p lending websites have been established in other international markets.
social lending services enabling micro financing (e.g. Kiva, MyC4) – participants driven mainly by social motives
other concepts (e.g. Virginmoney which is special in the way that it does not do the matchmaking between borrowers and lenders, but supports the process between persons that already had offline relations- slogan “We manage loans between family and friends“)
Sites funding student loans can fall into any of these three categories or combine motivations.
P2P-Banking.com has created the following overview table listing services that are in operation and ranked them by loan volume. The loan volumes are not directly comparable for they are cumulative since launch of each service and represent different time spans.
Asked for a figure, a Microplace spokesman pointed out “…it is important to note that MicroPlace is not a P2P site. We are a platform that offers investments to the retail public.“. No loan volume was quoted, but he stated “investments purchased on our site have enabled over 26,000 microfinance loans.”
In total approx. 685 million US$ have been funded through peer to peer lending/social lending services so far worldwide.
This image may be reprinted on other internet sites, provided it is not altered or resized and the following text (including the direct link to this article) is given as source directly below the image: Source: P2P-banking.com
If you are a representative of a p2p lending service and want your service to be included in the next update of this table, please send me an email with information about your company.
Prosper.com announced that it is entering a quite period:
Prosper has started a process to register, with the appropriate securities authorities, promissory notes that may be offered and sold to lenders through our site in the future.
The registration filing is a necessary step toward making the secondary lending market available to the community. This is something many of you have been asking for, and we believe the liquidity of a secondary market will make Prosper even more vibrant.
Until we complete the registration process, we will not accept new lender registrations or allow new commitments from existing lenders. If you’re an existing lender, your current lender agreements will be unaffected; your existing loans will continue to be serviced; you’ll be able to track and monitor your loans; and you’ll be able to withdraw funds from your Prosper account.
We analyze discrimination in a new type of credit market known as peer-to-peer lending. Specifically, we examine how lenders in this online market respond to signals of characteristics such as race, age, and gender that are conveyed via pictures and text. We find evidence of significant racial disparities; loan listings with blacks in the attached picture are 25 to 35 percent less likely to receive funding than those of whites with similar credit profiles. conditional on receiving a loan, the interest rate paid by blacks is 60 to 80 basis points higher than that paid by comparable whites. Though less significant than the effects for race, we find that the market also discriminates somewhat against the elderly and the overweight, but in favor of women and those that signal military involvement. Despite the higher average interest rates charged to blacks, lenders making such loans earn a lower net return compared to loans made to whites with similar credit profiles because blacks have higher relative default rates. This pattern of net returns is inconsistent with theories of accurate statistical discrimination (equal net returns) or costly taste-based preferences against loaning money to black borrowers (higher net returns for blacks). It is instead consistent with partial tastebased preferences by lenders in favor of blacks over whites or with systematic underestimation by lenders of relative default rates between blacks and whites.
Their conclusion:
Yet the data tell a very different story that suggests that this peer-to-peer lending market actually treats the races more equally than would be expected in a market with accurate statistical discrimination.
I would interpret this conclusion as a negation of p2p lending leading to racial discrimination. However Ron Shevlin at MarketingROI comes to different conclusions.
