Hello,
We are interested in knowing how we can improve for investors. What suggestions do you have to improve your experience on Prosper?
Let us know.
Glenn G. Millar
Prosper.com
"My Account" page should show total investment, so you don't have to add notes + cash + pending.
"Browse Listings" and page should allow sorting by column headers.
"Search Results" should have more columns, to allow sorting by levels, ie, Level 1 = Yield, Level 2 = Term, Level 3 = Rating, etc.
The biggest improvement I would like to see is an email or SMS notification service where Prosper can let me know if a new loan that meets one of my saved searches has come on to the platform. Sometimes loans I am interested in are fully funded before I get the chance to bid thanks to the large institutional guys like worth-blanket2 snapping up the lion's share of the loan.
One other things I would like to see is improvements to your performance and statistics section. A Lendstats-type utility should be part of the offering here.
Thanks for the posts! On the Instant Transfer request, that one we can change right away and you'll be happy to note that we just reduced the minimum from $500 to $25 effective right now! We had originally set $500 as the minimum to ensure we didn't get too many bounced deposits, but the experience has been pretty good to date so we'll reduce the minimum to $25 and watch the results. Btw, I agree with the need, almost all my bids are made after instant transfers - which I love. Thanks for the feedback to enable this feature more broadly. Enjoy!
Another small suggestion. Would it be possible to put an identifier next to the cash back listings? A star or note.
Currently the only way to know if certain loans are cashback, is to click on your cashback link. I then have to go through each loan 1 by 1 to see if they meet my criteria.
When I do a search for my investment criteria, it would be helpful to know which ones are cashback loans. Combined with the new instant transfers (which I greatly appreciate), this would also make investing choices easier and more frequent.
Thank you
Jason
Another idea:
Peter had a blog column about a friend of his investing her first $5k in huge chunks (like $500-$1k per loan). I know it's impossible to know
whether this behavior is from someone who plans to begin investing $5k per week or month or the like, but some kind of popup when users,
say, have an account balance of $5000 and then plop down bids that are greater than 5% or so of their total account value, reminding them
about the benefits of diversification, might be nice - and forestall any bad feelings against the platform by those who make such a mistake...
I realize that gets tricky, with instant xfers, and not necessarily having a useful denominator to look at, to gauge diversfication - and also not
having a crystal ball to know whether $1k or so bids per loan might still provide statistically meaningful diversification if the investors intends
deployment of $100k+ or so - but, maybe just target it to new investors or for the first five bids someone makes, if they are disproportionate.
I know this stuff exists in other parts of the site, but, something at point of bidding, much like how you used to pop up a warning when a bid,
under the old auction model, was significantly under the expected historical return for loans with similar credit characteristics, might be good.
Not everyone has a friend like Peter, who understands the need to diversify in p2p - but, then again, maybe Peter's friend is just an anomaly.
Anyway, just me worrying about people going away mad, when, if they'd do it right, they'd stick around and make themselves some dough...
Would a smartphone application be too costly to develop? With loans going quickly these days, I find myself not by a computer to log in before the good loans get snatched up. The mobile browser is ok, but an app would make things much easier and quicker. Just a thought.
For convenience purposes mostly, a section that displays your "gain/loss to date" for the current monthly statement would be nice. I know I could look at my last statement and do the math, but it would be convenient and even motivating (MAYBE) if I see my gains increase throughout the month. I believe this was in place in the old days, but I am not 100% on that.
This might be totally irrelevant to some, but for me someone with only 200+ notes with a wide range of different amounts in each note, it would be nice to know what loans your most recent payments came from. With my larger notes, I like to know who is doubling up payments or just paying fast in general in order to prepare to re-deploy those funds into other worthy notes. At times, I find myself not logging in because I am not expecting any big payments coming in, but to my surprise somebody is paying early, double, etc.
For collections, I think a section for comments to be uploaded for collectors would be nice. I for one would like to at least know that collectors are actively engaging with the borrowers to collect unpaid balances. No privacy details have to be listed, but at least a simple call log that displays if contact was made or not. I don't know if there is any legal challenges to that.
My math gurus can check me on this, but would a "current ROI as of today" section be feasible? For us that are not the most savvy with numbers, statistics etc., it would be nice to have at least a ESTIMATED ROI of our portfolio that updates daily automatically. I know there are websites that provide our profile with those numbers, but for one they differ from each other in my case, and for two, not everyone is up to speed with all those third-party sites.
Just a few suggestions that are entirely necessary, but they would add to the platform as a whole.
Thanks.
Peter,
With the forum reorganization, is it possible their accounts were deleted? I know mine was.
Jason
-I would like to be able to have two notes on 1 listing.
Currently if I bid $50 on a loan then later bid $100. I will have a $150 note.
I would rather have a $50 note and $100 note. $150 note is much harder to sell on folio then the smaller notes.
I stand corrected on the searching for featured loans. I can setup a saved search for featured loans with my search criteria. Pretty easy to do.
I still think a little indication that the note is featured may be helpful.
Peter, The same is true for me. I did not even know it was a featured note until the 3.25% showed on my detail page.
I have 3 loan filters setup currently. One for featured plus all my other requirements, one with just my requirements, and one with bare minimum 30+ payments. I do the last just to see how many repeat borrowers are out there at D or lower.
I have only seen 1 featured borrower with 30+ payments history and s/he has so many other negative factors I couldn't even try to bid on it.
Hope you all saw some of the changes on Prosper which have taken place in the last couple of days, which came straight from your requests.
1) We now show asset allocation.
2) We now show your ROI on your investor overview page.
3) We introduced automatic Quick Invest, so as loan requests are posted on the site, your Quick Invest can automatically invest in them and you don't miss out.
Here's a blog post about them:
http://blog.prosper.com/2011/10/27/new-for-investors-asset-allocation-seasoned-returns-and-more/Hope you like these changes and we are looking forward to your feed back.
We are working on your other suggestions as well. Stay tuned!
Glenn G. Millar
Prosper Employee
Glenn. Gotta say, those changes are a huge improvement. I think it was mentioned on the blog, but it adds a level of sophistication to the site. Hopefully it helps draw in more investors and borrowers alike.
Jason
Glenn,
I agree that the changes are a big improvement. But the overview page should show a summary of notes, counted by active, paid, late, in review, listed for trade. And you should be able to pull up inventory detail for each category count by clicking on it.
And it would be nice to see collection details for past due notes, similar to what Lending Club shows.
just starting with HR loans being extremely picky and have found some I like only to fill aeconds before I throw my $25 out, Always worth-blanket2, kinda annoying
I'd like to know why it takes 5-7 days for a sold note to settle at Prosper when it takes 1-3 days at Lending Club. They both use Folio. During the entire week long process Prosper or someone holds onto to my money for free.
Well that's very comforting but it doesn't answer my question. So again, I'd like to know why it takes 5-7 days for a sold note to settle at Prosper when it takes 1-3 days at Lending Club. Both companies use Folio. And I don't care what most investors do with their money. The indisputable fact is that I have access to my money within 1-3 days at Lending Club whereas it takes up to a week to get access to my money at Prosper. WHY?
Prosper can Prosper by doing the following:
1. Enable lenders to search for blender listings.
2. Including specific income information like LC; instead of $25k to 50k; or 50k to 75k.
3. Including employers name like LC.
4. Going Public- an IPO would generate much needed cash for Prosper and would bring new interest to P2P.
5. Get serious about collection efforts. Unlike LC, Prosper will not pursue defaulted loans through the court system. Prosper can even bring this service in-house as another way to generate additional revenue.
6. Keep lender promotions and have them more frequently throughout the year.
7. Have borrower payments be made on regular intervals instead of sporadically. I know when new loans are issued, 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. central time on the weekdays, but I never know when borrower payments will hit my account.
8. Offer longer term notes.
9. Provide other borrower information including assets, equity in home, and net worth.
10. Provide additional information regarding debts. If a borrower has a 24% DTI and does not have CC debt, I have no idea what the rest of the debt is.
Dagilbe, +1 for above post. Thanks for writing it all out.
#s 2,3,5, 9 if possible, and 10 would get me back on board. LC loses points for ease of use, but at least it has some information.
Alas, the OP, GM, hasn't logged into this forum since February.
I think this leaves Prosper without any direct involvement in these forums.