New And Shiny Collections Statistics

I had proposed a new way to look at collections progress back in early December. This method took to snapshots of Prosper's nightly data export, one month apart, and looked at how the lone status changed over time. I took my first snapshot on December 1, but by some fluke of luck, it turns out that I had the Nov 1 download laying around a second computer, so now we get an early look. The underlying assumption is that if a loan's state does not get worse (as in, going from 1 month late to two months late), some payment must've occurred. So, into the data.

	Total	Got Better	The Same	Got Worse
Payoff in progress	28	26 92.8%	0 0.0%	2 7.1%
Current	11697	154 1.3%	11238 96.0%	305 2.6%
Late	252	66 26.1%	40 15.8%	146 57.9%
1 month late	326	42 12.8%	24 7.3%	260 79.7%
2 months late	263	13 4.9%	9 3.4%	241 91.6%
3 months late	231	5 2.1%	9 3.8%	217 93.9%
4+ months late	618	6 0.9%	607 98.2%	5 0.8%

The interesting figures are that between Nov 1 and Dec 1, it looks like 20.3% of "1 Month Late" loans, 8.4% of "2 Month Late" loans, and 6.1% of "3 Month Late" loans had some kind of payment activity that kept things from falling further behind. The blood from a turnip category ("4+ Months Late") had 1% improve, though this is hardly definitive because payments that do not bring the borrower to 3 months late or better are not visible. I am hesitant to infer things from the "Late" category because it is not on a clean month to month boundary.

These statistics imply better collection performance than the official Penncro numbers that Prosper publishes, but a one month snapshot is insufficient to rule out a statistical anomaly.

Some other notes from the statistics include the 5 "4+ Late Loans" got worse by folks entering bankruptcy and 1 "1 Month Late" loan that was repurchased.