Prosper Marketplace is rebranding a personal-finance app that it acquired last year, a key part of the firm’s efforts to engage more frequently with its borrowers.
The mobile app, which offers fraud protection for consumers’ debit and credit cards, was formerly known as BillGuard. Starting Thursday, it will be called Prosper Daily.
The new name suggests to the app’s 1.6 million registered users that they ought to log in every day. Executives at San Francisco-based Prosper will certainly be pleased if they do.
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The marketplace lender is paying $30 million in cash plus an undisclosed amount of stock. It plans to use BillGuards apps, which come with detailed information about their users financial habits, to attract new borrowers.
September 24 -
Moven, the digital-only "neobank," is partnering with online lenders as part of an effort to differentiate its services and become its users' go-to app for financial transactions of all sorts. Banks ought to pay close attention to this rebundling effort.
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Prosper is already offering loans at doctor's offices while Lending Club is testing a device that would allow it to make loans on the spot at car dealerships and other retailers. The efforts highlight the need for marketplace lenders to keep innovating as competition for customers intensifies.
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“We’d like to have more of a relationship with our customers,” Itzik Cohen, the firm’s chief business officer, said in an interview.
Prosper currently offers personal loans ranging from $2,000 to $35,000, but the online lender has designs on a larger piece of the consumer-finance market, including loans at retail points of sale.
The rebranded app should help Prosper to cross-sell additional products to its existing borrowers. The acquisition, announced in September, also enables Prosper to market its personal loans to BillGuard’s users.
In addition to the rebranding, Prosper said that it is making free certain features that previously required a paid BillGuard subscription. Users will no longer have to pay to access their credit scores, or to link a large number of financial accounts to the app.
Prosper Daily, like its predecessor, also allows consumers to track their spending by category. Prosper will continue to charge users for a version of the app that offers identity protection.
Cohen said that additional features would be added in the coming months. He declined to discuss the firm’s specific plans for the app, but indicated that they will relate to financial well-being.
“For us, this is just the beginning,” he said. “I think this platform will allow for extreme innovation in the next few years.”
