It is hard to imagine the product meeting where someone pitched the notion that a random screen-name generator would improve business. He would have had to pitch the notion that thinking up a screen name was the impediment to a substantial number of borrowers. In any group of listeners I can imagine, he would be laughed out of the room. My only alternative is to imagine that such a meeting never happened.
As I said before, I think this was carefully crafted and clearly intended to further eliminate any PII on Prosper, and further handcuff lenders from doing due dilligence on borrowers. I'm sure Prosper realized that a not-insubstantial number of borrowers use first-name-last-name or first-initial-last-name as their screen names, while an even greater number use the same screen name they use on other online endeavors (making deep googling possible). Moreover, even when a screen name doesn't directly connect a borrower to their real-life identity, in a lot of cases it at least provides further evidence once a possible connection is otherwise made (it might reference someone's profession, or their alma mater, etc.).
From Prosper's (misguided) perspective, anything that cuts down on this is very beneficial for Prosper:
1) Some loans that wouldn't fund because lenders could find a bunch of dirt on the borrower, prove they are lying, etc., now get funded, which has two important benefits for Prosper -- it gets the origination fee, and it gets to count the loan in its rapidly dwindling origination statistics.
2) In some cases Lenders can no longer establish that loans are the result of ID-theft, thereby allowing Prosper to more easily shirk its duty of repurchasing them via its so-called "100% identity-theft guarantee," saving Prosper cash as well as PR black eyes.
3) In some cases lenders can no longer match up loans that go BK with the PACER reports, thereby preventing us from showing Prosper's incompetence in its handling of BK's.
Some of Prosper's biggest PR headaches have been where forum detectives matched borrowers to their real world identities -- Indictment-Man, Conviction-Man, Leporello's infamouos ID-theft case, etc.