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List of P2P Lending Forums

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Peer to peer lending is innovative and new. New users usually have lots of questions when grasping the marketplace mechanisms. Beyond the FAQ of the p2p lending service, a great place to learn is usually a forum, where users (mostly lenders) exchange experiences and post and answer questions.

There are “official” forums provided by the lending services and independent ones. One of the first ones, the official Prosper forum, became one of the most notorious ones. After Prosper “moderated” negative and critical posts it later deleted the initial forum in total. When a copied version of the forum’s archive was made available on seperate internet site Prosper tried to  shut the site down, but failed.

But this is an extreme example. I found that on nearly all other forums a very helpful and supportive attitude rules.

List of p2p lending forums

General

Focus on one p2p lending service

If I have missed any great p2p lending forum, please comment with the URL and I will add it to the above list. Thank you.

(Photo credit: wili_hybrid)

Finding the best MyC4 loans

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MyC4.com accelerated growth during the past month. This is shown by stats on MyC4Stats.com (provided by Wiseclerk.com) showing the loan volume by origination month. Compared to earlier months the loan volume rose sharply in December and January. In December 150,000 Euro loans and in January 250,000 Euro loans were disbursed to African entrepreneurs.

myc4 loan volume by month
(Source: MyC4Stats.com)

The new MyC4Stats page offers reports helping lenders to find open MyC4 loan listings with the best rates. At MyC4 – unlike at Prosper – every lender funds a loan at his individual interest rate. In fact 50 different lenders funding one specific loan may each earn different, self-set interest rates. While MyC4 sets a maximum for the weighted average interest rate for each loan, it is still possible for an individual lender to bid higher and earn more after funding.

Example: A 2500 Euro loan to Clementine Gbrou, who exports grains to Europe the maximum weighted Wanted interest rate was 12% (lender interest, not borrower). This loan closed with a weighted average interest rate of 11,64% (lender interest). The individual lenders in this loan earn DIFFERENT selfselected interest rate between 3% and 13.5%. Several lenders thus achieved above average rates.

How to find the best loans?

To select the loans with the best rates for bidding in the listing phase a quick overview of available listings sorted by the maximum possible interest rates that can be bid, is important. Several tables on MyC4Stats help lenders on this. Sample screenshot:

Myc4 bidding tool
(Source: MyC4Stats.com)

The report presents the listings sorted by maximum interest rate (column Maximum bid) that can be bid and states the Euro amount above this rate that serves as a buffer before being outbid. The buffer is caused by the rule that new bids must always be place at least 0.5% lower then the current high bid.

Evolving Wiseclerk to a p2p lending information exchange

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As some of you might have noticed, the main page of Wiseclerk.com changed today and now offers a p2p lending discussion forum. I believe there is a huge need for information on the developing p2p lending services. In this spirit I started Wiseclerk.com in April 2006 to create useful overview reports on Prosper. While it was not the first site of this kind (some oldtimers may remember Savagenumber.com by atlantageek) it did grow quickly and built a loyal userbase among Prosper lenders.

Prosper did from the beginning support the efforts of developers by providing data publicly and later offering data export interfaces and APIs.

Both the Wiseclerk reports and the later added blog were started with a focus on Prosper. That was appropriate at that point in time but now I think a broader view is needed. Lenders can choose between several p2p lending services and the flow of information needs to be taken to a meta platform level. Lenders that lend on several platforms will not want to check several forums – each one tied to the single platform.

The new forum will also serve as a feedback and discussion location for ideas and news published in the p2p-banking blog. Later today I will add a display into the blog that shows the latest discussion threads from the forum.

Continue reading →

Booberwatch offers statistics on boober.nl p2p lending

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The new website booberwatch.nl offers p2p lending stats for the Dutch p2p lending service boober.nl (as wiseclerk.com does for prosper.com stats). While the site is in Dutch language, it has many charts and tables that can be understood without speaking Dutch. The main page shows the fluctation of average interest for each credit grade over time. According to booberwatch 536207 Euros have been loaned so far.

Incremental data export of prosper data now available

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Are you tired of downloading the complete Prosper Data Export of 60 to 100 MB every day, when actually you only want the new data?

At wiseclerk.com registered users now can download an incremental data export file. This is a xml file that is produced daily and contains only the new data.

This reduces file sizes to only 5 to 10 MB per day. You can download a sample file here (8 MB) – please right click with your mouse on the link and use "save as" to save the file on your computer.

Wiseclerk.com scripts reliably run since April 2006 without any major downtimes. Should for any reason a script fail to run on a day, the next produced incremental file will include all data since last run (in this case it would contain data for two days).

Please note that by downloading data you agree to be bound by Prosper's API Terms of Use.
Furthermore please not that data supplied by wiseclerk.com is provided as is – without any guaranties for correct representation of data. By downloading data from wiseclerk.com you agree not to make any claims against wiseclerk.com in the future for whatever reasons (e.g. missing data, wrong data).