Welcome to my blog

Hi, I'm Trav! I'm known as traveler505 on Prosper.com (a people-to-people lending site), Prospers.org (an independent forum for discussion of P2P lending), and CreditBoards.com (a self-help consumer advocacy site).

When I discovered Prosper Marketplace Inc. (PMI) in May 2006, I was excited by the concept of P2P lending, and, despite early skepticism regarding various aspects of PMI’s implementation of that concept, I regarded it as a noble experiment worthy of support, as did many other "lenders". ("Lenders" is Prosper's terminology for people who bid on the opportunity to purchase parts of the loans which Prosper originates.)

I became an active lender, and once I felt that I had an adequate understanding of what was necessary to deliver profitable loans to loan purchasers, I opened a group, and began working on plans to actively promote the Prosper loan product. (My group, by the way, has yielded a net ROI for “lenders” of over 20%, from loans to the subprime borrowers which PMI now wishes to exclude from its customer base.)

As long as I could believe that PMI was engaged in a noble experiment, I was willing to set aside many of my suspicions and concerns about corporate misconduct and mismanagement in the hopes that these issues were simply the growing pains of a start-up enterprise, and that they would eventually be addressed or ameliorated over time.

Unfortunately, Prosper’s actions over the past six months, beginning with the March 31 suspension of ten lenders from its official forum, and continuing through the recent closure and deletion of the official forum and attacks on independent third-party websites, demonstrate that PMI has chosen the low road of suppressing information about its short-comings and malfeasance, rather than the high road of making a good faith attempt to correct them.

They have proven to me that there is nothing noble about PMI, and I will be proceeding accordingly, as an advocate for the interests of “lenders” and borrowers who have been victimized by its actions.

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When Prosper Marketplace Inc. eliminated compensation for group leaders, forcing me to close my small but very successful group, a lender who goes by BigGulp told me "Trav, you can always take up another hobby."

I took his advice, and the result was a series of MNH ("My New Hobby") reports, exposing regulatory and contractual compliance issues in Prosper's operations. This blog is the new home of the MNH Reports; you can also find them on Prospers.org.

I'll also be using this blog to comment more generally on the evolution of the P2P lending concept, as new players open for business.