Early this month Prosper said goodbye to its old API. It was announced back in March that this transition was coming but some sites, including Prosper Stats, continued to use the old API. At the time Rocco, the founder of Prosper Stats, was unsure whether he would put in the work needed to convert to the new API.
Many investors, myself included, used Prosper Stats regularly. I particularly liked their detailed bid data of top Prosper investors including Worth-Blanket2. You could even see the investors who were earning the best returns and what loans they were bidding on. But then Prosper made the decision in February to stop sharing bid data with investors so this popular feature stopped being updated. While I understood and respected their decision to do this I know this annoyed Rocco and many other Prosper investors.
More important than the bid data, in my opinion, was the ability to analyze the Prosper loan history. But since the API change in early May, Prosper Stats has not been updated at all. It used the old API and so couldn’t pull in any new data. The unfortunate thing for investors is that Prosper Stats is really the only game in town for analyzing the Prosper loan history. This is why I was very pleased to see this blog post from Rocco yesterday.
In this post he said that he would be updating the Loan Analysis page which I consider the most important feature of his site. He also said this.
Hopefully this update makes prosper-stats.com at least somewhat useful again until I can finish up my rewrite and start introducing new tools that will replace the Previously Late loan tool and add some new functionality.
Looks like Prosper-Stats.com will continue to be a useful tool for Prosper investors. I, for one, am breathing a sigh of relief. With Prosper’s loan volume increasing dramatically in recent months it is more important than ever that we have third party analysis tools. I appreciate Rocco putting in the work to make these changes.
Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of LendIt Fintech, the world’s first and largest digital media and events company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series. Peter has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The New York Times, CNBC, CNN, Fortune, NPR, Fox Business News, the Financial Times, and dozens of other publications.