February Prosper Collections Report

This is part of my ongoing series monitoring collections efficiency (January's report for comparison). For a reminder on the methodology, I took a snapshot of all of Prosper's loans on February 1 and compared their current status against those same loans on March 3 (yes, I'm a doofus and missed March 1). Presumably, loans that don't get further behind have some kind of money extracted in the collections process. The statistics are below.

	Total	Got Better	Stayed The Same	Got Worse
Payoff in progress	28	28 100.0%	0 0.0%	0 0.0%
Current	13271	241 1.8%	12719 95.8%	311 2.3%
Late	228	58 25.4%	36 15.7%	134 58.7%
1 month late	297	22 7.4%	19 6.3%	256 86.1%
2 months late	265	11 4.1%	14 5.2%	240 90.5%
3 months late	229	5 2.1%	6 2.6%	218 95.1%
4+ months late	585	7 1.1%	511 87.3%	67 11.4%

This does not look good. The Signs Of Collections (SOC) statistics are below.

Months Late	February SOC	January SOC	December SOC
1 Month	13.7%	20.6%	23.0%
2 Month	9.3%	12.8%	2.8%
3 Months	4.7%	8.0%	3.8%

This is, by all accounts, a rather large statistical kick in the shins for lenders. There are two things that may distort February's collections numbers, however. First, Prosper transitioned their primary collections company from Penncro to AmSher. I find it unreasonable to expect a perfectly clean transition with no drop off when making a change of this magnitude. Second, I screwed up and didn't get the data until March 3rd. This may overstate the unsuccessful collections efforts.

The "4+ months late" category is very hard to quantify percentage wise. The default sales make month over month comparison very difficult. There were 62 loans that transitioned to "Default (Delinquency)" which are presumably part of Prosper's collections-by-lawsuit effort. We'll see them rattle around further in next month's dataset.