Jim Bruene's Netbanker reports on person-to-person lender Prosper.com's new marketing initiatives including its new slogan: "Let's bank on each other." More on the Prosper Blog.

On The FinanSer, Chris Skinner blogs about today's world of what he calls 'disconnected banking' - noting that bankers have 'managed to get customers out of branches and transform them into data entry clerks, who serve themselves through ATMs and the Internet.' Who's he watching instead? The social finance sites like Zopa, Prosper and more - typically dismissed by bankers as 'folly, unpractical, unregulated and untenable.'

In an article titled 'Where Either a Borrower or a Lender Can Be', Jane J. Kim writes for the Wall St. Journal about person-to-person lending networks (like Prosper.com, Lending Club.com and Zopa.com) and how small business owners are increasingly turning to those networks as access to bank credit has become more difficult.

Update: Jim Bruene gets this one right over on his NetBanker blog - it's actually about person-to-business lending!

Prosper.com has updated its People-to-People Lending Market Survey to reflect results through the end of September. In September, $5.4 million in loans were funded at an average loan size of $7,175. Over average over the month, 2,298 borrowers were looking for loans. A market commentary by CEO Chris Larson addressed the question of whether the Prosper lending marketplace anticipated the Fed's recent 50 basis point cut in interest rates.

Prosper has introduced its first monthly People-to-People Lending Market Survey that provides key statistics including: membership and loan volume statistics, marketplace returns; borrower rates; mix of prime, near prime and sub-prime loans, noteworthy marketplace statistics/trends and a market commentary by Chris Larsen, Chief Executive Officer of Prosper.

In an article titled 'Options Grow For Investors To Lend Online", Jane Kim writes for the Wall St. Journal about new web-based services enabling investors to lend money to strangers online. She reports that Prosper.com has about $60 million in loans outstanding so far this year and cites the Online Banking Report's estimate that a total of about $100 million in loans will be originated by all providers this year.

Personal finance columnist Eileen Ambrose writes for the Baltimore Sun about Prosper.com - saying that "with people becoming their own publisher by blogging, or creating their own videos and political commercials on YouTube, it was just a matter of time before they became their own banks."

The Get Rich Slowly blog has an interesting post titled "What’s It Like to BORROW Money with Prosper?" written by Tricia (who also writes her own blog titled Blogging Away Debt) describing her experiences as a borrower using Prosper.com to find other folks willing to lend her money. She describes her experience seeking to borrow $3,500. She posted a starting interest rate she was willing to pay of 12%. As it turns out, lenders competed for her business and she ended up getting an interest rate of 9.9% from a group of 13 Prosper lenders.

The Innovate blog written by two students at Stanford's business and design schools has posted a podcast interview of Chris Larsen, CEO of person-to-person lending company Prosper.com. "In this podcast, Chris chats with Julio and Min Li about Prosper's innovative vision, its unique challenges as an eBay platform for money (check out Prosper's cool tools for academics and researchers for performing case studies on its model), and the fine balance between the countervailing forces of transparency and privacy in the world of Web 2.0."

Jessica Anderson writes for Kiplinger.com about being a person-to-person lender on Prosper.com - saying it "offers financial rewards with a dose of good karma."

Celebrating its one year anniversary, Prosper.com this morning announced a series of enhancements to its service including bringing customer service in-house in San Francisco (from offshore), enabling borrowers to gain credibility from personal endorsements by friends and family, and providing lends with six additional credit data fields from Experian to help evaluate a borrower's loan request.

Yesterday, Marketplace, a business news radio program from American Public Media, had a segment all about peer-to-peer lending - in particular about Prosper.com. A transcript of the segment is available online along with the audio that you can listen to online. The segment is introduced with the comment: "banks, credit card companies and those payday loan centers make billions of dollars every year lending us money. But why should they get all the profit?"

Annys Shin writes for the Washington Post about person-to-person lending at Prosper.com. "Instead of selling your money to a bank to see the bank sell that money to someone else at 19 percent, why can't I have some of that money?" chief executive Chris Larsen said.

ABC News has a feature story this morning for consumer's about how to make the most of credit cards based upon an interview on Good Morning America with Ron Lieber, staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Lieber recommends borrowing first from family members and never, if you can avoid it, from credit card companies. In between he suggests considering Propser.com, the person-to-person lending company.

Jim Bruene writes on the Financial Marketing Weekly blog about the 2006 results for Prosper.com - suggesting that Prosper.com's revenues for 2006 were in the range of $300,000 - based upon a 1 per cent origination fee charged on almost $30 million of loans originated. Obviously, they'll need to grow that revenue number by a couple of orders of magnitude for this person-to-person lending business to be considered economically viable.

Kara McGuire writes for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune about personal lending on Prosper.com. "In a recent report, Online Banking Report founder Jim Bruene predicted that, within five years, there could be as many as 100,000 person-to-person loans in the United States per year, worth more than $1 billion."

In an article titled 'The Virtual Moneylender", Farhad Manjoo writes for Salon.com about Prosper.com, "a new Web site allows you to borrow money from strangers in cyberspace. It may even free you from credit card debt and the usurers at the local payday loan center."

Jane Boon Pearlstine writes for the Wall St. Journal about some of her first hand experiences lending online on Prosper.com where she's made "more than 300 small loans at an average rate of about 21%."   » Continue Reading

In a comprehensive report that, in our opinion, is a "must read" for senior bankers interested in important emerging competitive trends, the latest issue of the Online Banking Report examines in detail the person-to-person lending business being pursued by Prosper.com and Zopa.   » Continue Reading

Carolyn Said reports for the San Francisco Chronicle about hometown startup Prosper.com, the latest person to person lending enabler that is backed by $20 million raised from venture investors Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Ventures and Omidyar Network.   » Continue Reading

Last week the Economist took at look at person-to-person, "bank-less" lending from Zopa.com and Prosper.com.   » Continue Reading

Andrew Reinbach, editor of Electronic Payments Week, has recently written about Prosper.com and Prosper's CEO Chris Larsen. Here's Andy's analysis - posted with permission.   » Continue Reading

Prosper, highlighted earlier here on Payments News when they "soft launched" their web site, officially launched today calling themselves America's first people-to-people lending marketplace and comparing Prosper's approach to lending to that of eBay - a marketplace.

"Until now, financial institutions have controlled who is able to obtain credit and the rates people pay," said Chris Larsen, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Prosper. "Over time, this one-sided control has bred inefficiencies and excessive margins -- leading to higher rates for borrowers, and restricting people who have money to lend from entering and generating income from this vital and lucrative market."

Robert Hof of Business Week does an in-depth story on the Prosper.com Marketplace and compares its approach to that of eBay by matching small borrowers with lenders. Also, see our earlier post about Prosper.com.