Well, the "final maturity" on the loans is five years. Three year loans? Five years. Five year loans? Five years.
That means that on 3-year loans, there are 2 extra years of wiggle room to deal with being late, payment plans, etc. while still coming out OK. But for five-year loans, there's no wiggle room at all. If the last payment's late, the p2p lending platform has no legal obligation to pay it to the investor.
Both Prosper and Lending Club work this way.
For this reason, a number of people (including myself) aren't putting a lot of money into five-year notes until a bunch of them have matured and we get to see what happens at the end of their five-year term. It may work out just fine. People may pay up in time after all. And even if they don't Lending Club and Prosper may give the post-maturity payments back to the investors anyway, despite what the the fine print says, to keep investor goodwill and dollars coming in. Or things may work out badly, and investors may get burned. We'll see. Once we get to see what happens, I'd say that would be the time to decide whether to put a lot of money in. In the meanwhile, there's no reason to get upset about things. Being safe means not having to be sorry.