Another Prosper Upgrade

Prosper's performed their September upgrade last night. As someone named Andrew (Prosper Andrew perhaps?) commented in a previous post, the rapid transfer is now functional and will be called "Instant Transfer". Prosper's also implemented their much talked about changes to group rewards as well as some additional changes. From the announcement forum post:

Instant Transfers for Lenders

After several months of beta testing transfers with little to no delay (I think it was called "rapid transfer" at the time), and after your copious amounts of feedback, we've built what is now known as "Instant transfer" into a proper feature, which indicates when you're eligible for an instant transfer, and makes the money available instantly (no more 15-minute wait).

Here's how it works - when a new transfer to Prosper meets the requirements below, funds are made available in a lender's Prosper account instantly, with no delay:

• Transfer amount must be between $500 and $10,000
• Sum of pending transfers must be <20%>

For example, if you had an active loan value of $10,000, you could transfer between $500 and $2,000 to your Prosper account instantly. If you attempted to transfer $3,000 to Prosper, it would not qualify for instant transfer because the amount is more than 20% of your active loan value. Your $3,000 transfer would still continue, but would be subject to the standard 4-day waiting period.

Group changes

As we announced a few weeks ago, we are making some changes to the group model to more closely resemble our original vision for the concept. As of this release:

• Group leader payment rewards: These will no longer be available to group leaders. Listings created on Sep 13, 2007 and after will not be eligible for group leader rewards.
• Search results changes: Group names and ratings have been removed from search results. When doing research with new lenders, we found that introducing groups in the search results introduced confusion and blocked lenders from proceeding to find listings easily. You can still search on specific groups using the advanced search feature.
• Group categories: We've discontinued the use of group categories. We will eventually introduce a more intuitive set of loan categories (debt consolidation, business financing, student loan, etc.) for listings shortly.
• Personally identifiable information: In the interest of group member privacy, we've started removing personally identifiable information from group membership requests.

Prosper Andrew also notes that instead of one huge upgrade, they'll be dribbling the upgrades out slowly over time.