!!! If you are a borrower (or lender) who plans to ask for a new Prosper loan, make sure your banking information is up to date before you start !!! (valid as of July 2010)
I had a borrower who began a new listing. Before he submitted it, he checked his My Account> Settings> Bank Accounts and realized his "Primary Account" was one he no longer had. He added his new account info but the system refused to un-flag his dead account as the primary one. Thus, he could not delete it. "Go ahead and submit your listing," I said, "You'll have to call Prosper to straighten that out."
"Well, I just got off the phone with Prosper's call center," he reported, "and to make a long story short, they couldn’t delete that old bank account from my account, nor make the one that I’d just recently added my primary account, not instantly anyway. Their rep stated that will happen when their system does its next update in the overnight hours." I told him he better check to see that it did.
Some months ago Prosper instituted a twin database setup, the one we all see on dot-com and another that is the robot banker for borrowers and their loans. At launch there were serious integration issues between the two and some of these persist. Unfortunately, Prosper's head IT guy quit on them some three months prior and these latest upgrades were done without him. Lenders and borrowers reported countless glitches all over the platform. As of this writing Prosper was still busy fixing both platforms and the integration between them.
"And get this," my borrower said, "The rep also stated that, if I had added that new account AFTER my listing went live, there would have been no way that they could changed my primary account at all. And since I no longer do business with my so called "primary" financial institution of record, they would have denied my loan and I would have had to re-list it!"
Prosper told the borrower this was some sort of a fraud-protection policy but I'm skeptical that's true, given hick-ups of all sorts that have occurred since their late Spring 2010 "upgrade" was rolled out. They would purposely institute barriers to a successful listing for such a silly reason? And without warning to the borrower during their listing origination phase?
I hope this caution becomes redundant shortly, but for now, better get your banking affairs set in stone before you begin a listing!