Source: Prosper
Prosper.com, the world's largest peer-to-peer lending marketplace with over one million members and $233 million loans funded, today released its monthly loan Market Survey report for April 2011. Prosper continues to post strong growth, reporting a compound monthly growth rate of more than 14.5 percent over the last eight months.
The strongest month-over-month growth continues to be in the small business loan category, with a 19 percent increase in April 2011 and an 85% increase from six months ago. Debt consolidation remains the leading loan category on Prosper.com. And, as home equity lines of credit from banks remain scarce, home improvement loans hold steady as one of the top loan categories in the Market Survey.
"Our powerful combination of strong lender returns -- the best in the P2P category -- and our best-practices credit risk management model has helped us drive the industry's best month-over-month growth rate," said Chris Larsen, chief executive officer and co-founder of Prosper. "Lenders are drawn to a model that allows for strong returns and a risk management model based 100% on real P2P performance data."
Prosper was founded as a way to bring a more efficient, transparent and trustworthy process to consumer finance, removing the barriers of traditional consumer financing. For lenders, Prosper delivers a new asset class with annual returns averaging 10.4%*, the best in the category.