credit data Archives - Lend Academy

Prosper Crosses $4 Billion in Total Loans Issued, $912 Million in Q2

Another great quarter from Prosper with $912.4 million in new loans issued, up 147% from Q2 2014. Today, they have crossed $4 Billion in total loans issued since inception.

July 9, 2015 By Peter Renton 3 Comments

Prosper has had yet another big quarter. In Q2 they issued $912.4 million in new loans and today they announced that they have crossed $4 billion in total loans issued. I caught up with Aaron Vermut, the CEO of Prosper, earlier this week to get an update on what has been happening there.

The first thing he said was that the second quarter numbers were significantly ahead of their plan. The growth was driven by better execution and more productive partnerships. He also said they have improved their loan verification procedures significantly and their listing to loan ratio is now over 70% – meaning borrower listings that turn into funded loans. Their goal is to do more automated verification so they can scale loan volume without having to add new employees at the same pace.

Prosper Now Employs 456 People

Speaking of employees Prosper now employs 456 people in three locations: San Francisco, Phoenix and Salt Lake City. This is up from 230 people at the end of December. They have doubled the engineering team and have also brought their customer experience group in-house and have built that team to 68 people in short order.

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Lending Club Removes Data Fields from Loan History and the API

November 7, 2014 By Peter Renton 43 Comments

In a surprise announcement yesterday Lending Club sent notice that it has decided to make some changes to the data available to investors. Anyone who uses the API received this email yesterday:

Dear Investor,

Today, we have implemented some changes across the Lending Club platform that are reflected in some of the downloadable files, and may impact some of your API programming to the degree you reference these fields. Specifically, we have standardized date references and have removed some fields from the files relating to credit attributes. You may read more on these changes at this page in the Knowledge Base.

This announcement came completely out of the blue and will certainly impact many investors who use the API to buy notes on the Lending Club platform. Given the fact that this data has also been removed from the data download of the loan history it will also impact analysis that investors have done.

Summary of These Changes

The data download has gone from exactly 100 fields down to 56 – the list of the deleted fields is available in the Knowledge Base.
These same fields have been removed from the API so any credit models or filters built on these 44 fields will soon no longer work.
Date fields are now in a Month-Year format rather than a specific date – you will no longer know the exact date loans were issued.
Policy Code 2 loans are now no longer available in the data download – this was not mentioned in this change but they are now clearly missing from the download.

So, we have a number of data fields no longer available and a large number of loans that have completely disappeared from public view. But it is the missing data fields that has caused the most concern from what I have been hearing over the past couple of days.

There are many large investors who have built credit models based on these additional data fields. There are also many small investors who have been using these data fields on Nickel Steamroller to create filters to invest through the API. In both instances changes will have to be made to continue investing.

In my own company, Lend Academy Investments, we have a fund that uses an advanced credit model to choose loans and when we spoke with our analyst today he told us that the model would have to be completely redone. There are many other large investors in the same boat.

The Thinking Behind the Changes

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A Rich Database of New Credit Data Now Available from Prosper

December 4, 2012 By Peter Renton 3 Comments

I have complained many times over the last two years that the historical loan data on Prosper was far too complex for the average investor to work with. Until now the data has only been available in XML format or through the API. That is why I have always relied on the third party sites like Prosper Stats, and before them Lendstats, to do analysis of the Prosper history.

Yesterday, Prosper simplified their data download and at the same time made some major changes to what is available. The details are described on their blog here. While the changes are a vast improvement there is now a huge amount of data to wade through. The good news is that the data is available in the easy to use CSV format so the files can be opened in Excel.

There are four new files available and here is an explanation of each one.

1. Expanded Underwriting Archive

This CSV is compressed in a Zip file because it is so large. This file when uncompressed is 340 Megabytes and contains very detailed credit information on loan listings dating back to July 2008. And when they say detailed information they mean it. There are 558 data points for more than 118,000 loan listings so you can see why it is a big file. Not all of these listings became loans and many would not make it on to the platform today but it provides a big base of information to work from.

2. Expanded Underwriting Attribute Data Dictionary

This Excel file contains an explanation of all the fields in the Expanded Underwriting Archive and Recent Listing Sample.

3. Loan Data Export

This file is the equivalent of the historical data download at Lending Club. It contains detailed information on every loan going back to day one. With just 55 fields it doesn’t have all the data points of the Expanded Underwriting Archive but investors will recognize many of the fields here. I imagine this file will be the starting point for many investors. Most of the fields in the Loan Data Export are self-explanatory but I have been told a data dictionary is coming for this file as well.

4. Recent Listing Sample with Expanded Underwriting Data

A subset of the loans available at Prosper has this expanded underwriting information and these are included here. It is important to note that this is not a real time file and at the moment the intention is for this file to be updated once a week. The purpose of this file is to provide sophisticated investors with a complete credit dataset that can be used to make more intelligent investing decisions.

So there you have it. All these files are available on Prosper’s new Download page. For the data and credit junkie you now have more information than ever before. I had no idea there was this much data available on borrowers and that some investors were demanding it.

One of the advantages for the average investor is that we will now be able to do an apples to apples comparison between Lending Club and Prosper data. It will be interesting to see how this information will be used by the many p2p lending statistics sites. I expect we will see some really useful tools launch soon to help investors use this new information.