Prosper’s Ron Suber Discusses Growth of P2P Lending and How to Participate with Motley Fool [VIDEO]

Motley Fool recently interviewed Prosper’s Head of Global Institutional Sales, Ron Suber. In this video interview he discussed the growth of P2P lending, how anyone can participate, but also how it’s seen great interest from institutional investors, as well as wealth advisors. He also covers returns in P2P lending in this excerpt:

Koppenheffer: Now, you kind of already answered this for us, so we can just do this quickly. Is this an alternative to an individual bond, a bond fund, or a dividend-paying stock, or is the right way to think about this as a new, separate asset class?

Suber: That’s a great question. We’re hearing from many financial planners and wealth managers that they are putting a portion of their clients’ assets in the fixed income category into peer-to-peer finance loans — and I can tell you why in two quick numbers.

If you look at the aggregate U.S. bond market, and the index of it, the one-year performance is -2.02%, as of today. If they had invested the portion in peer-to-peer finance, and done a diversified index portfolio, the yield would be roughly 8% for that same one-year period.

If we look at the one-month period, the aggregate U.S. bond market index was down, -0.57%, but if you had indexed the peer-to-peer platform, Prosper, in a diversified index portfolio, the yield for that one-month period would be positive 0.60%, so up more than one half of one percent for the one-month period.

Here’s the video from Motley Fool:

The original post and full transcript can be found on Motley Fool.

The Prime Meridian Income Fund is a p2p lending fund that allows investors to participate in p2p lending without making the individual investments in multiple opportunities. Learn more about the Prime Meridian Income Fund.