Prosper released their Automated Quick Invest (AQI) tool back in October. It worked great for a while – it was a totally hands off way for investors to find new loans and invest in them without ever having to login. But as many investors have shared here in the comments on this blog, it started to have some problems a few weeks ago.
What was happening is Worth-Blanket2, Prosper’s largest investor, was snapping up entire loans as soon as they were available on the platform. Sometimes these loans were only available for literally 20 seconds before they were fully funded by Worth-Blanket2.
You see, Worth-Blanket2 was using the API to do their investing and this API allowed investing in a new loan every second. So Worth-Blanket2 could invest in 60 loans in the first 60 seconds they were available. Considering that most of the time there were less than 60 loans added to the platform at a time, they essentially blocked out the retail investor from many loans. [click to continue…]
Many investors like to do their own analysis of the raw data from Lending Club and Prosper. To do that you have to go to the download area of each site and access the data separately. Then you have to figure out what all the fields mean because both companies store their data in completely different ways.
Michael from Nickel Steamroller thought there had to be a better way. So, he has created an open standard and a central location where investors can go to download the data from Lending Club and Prosper. Best of all he has made the data available in exactly the same format for both companies. It is called P2PXML and it launched last week.
Why Use P2PXML?
Of course, investors can just go to Lendstats or Nickel Steamroller to do analysis on the p2p lending data. But these sites do not give users access to the raw data. The biggest benefit of accessing data through P2PXML is standardization which makes it much easier to use. The data is presented in exactly the same way for both companies. [click to continue…]
