I was trying to use Prosper to see whether I went up to an A yet earlier this morning. Some things which I noted have changed, although I'm not sure we already knew about these:
* The first question that gets asked is Business/Personal. I picked Personal. They then ask you how much you want and to self-identify your credit grade -- four choices, Excellent/Good/Average/Poor. My guess is that they have some logic to say if you're unlikely to fund ($15,000 and Poor) that they say "Whoa, maybe you want to rethink that" before having to pay for a pull to see that you are, indeed, HR. Good expectation management.
* Auto funding? What is that? The choice is now displayed as a pair of formats: Auction and No Auction. The tradeoff is phrased like this:
Auction: Your interest rate may be bid down as lenders compete for your loan.
No auction: Your interest rate cannot be bid down by lenders. Learn more. (Link to
http://www.prosper.com/help/contextual/listing_automatic_funding.aspx )
Since this sounds like a much, much poorer deal than "Auto-funding: Get your money fast!!1" does to a person in financial difficulty, I think we'll see even less AF than we already do.
* They now bury the information that applying on Prosper won't ding your credit. I don't know whether that is an oversight or possibly a recognition of the fact that anyhow who knows they need to count inquiries is probably not a good risk versus the average person who has no clue. (This somewhat counterintuitive "The more you know about your finances, the more dangerous you are" insight brought to you by
www.creditboards.com .)
* They don't display your credit to you before writing your listing. Again, seems like they want to deemphasize the importance of that to borrowers, making the listing proper be about personal/fluffy stuff, and then the credit information (which will drive the decision) gets ONLY presented by the credit box. I didn't click to the next stage in the process to see if you can actually see it before setting a listing live.
