New Milepoint Lending Team [general info]

I have now received over 100% of my expected repayments. In other words, a few of my delinquent loans are paying back or paying off, including my oldest loan from May 2010.

I have had also more repayments than I had calculated (quite a bit more than Kiva calculated), almost all from prepayments.

Something else amazing is happening. When I go to the lend page, loans are now sorted by repayment term (my usual choice) instead of popularity. This is something I have wanted Kiva to do for years. Thank you Kiva! This will make searching for loans quicker and easier for me.

I was happy too. However, as i was informed by more careful searchers than I, this is actually a cookie remembering your last choice, but the default has not changed from popularity.

Yes, I understood that this is not the default for everyone. I am very glad Kiva has installed this cookie. Now I don't have to use kivalens so much.

The cookie was most helpful.

I made a number of loans to small loan requests that needed less than $50 to be fully funded and the cookie identified those profiles.

Could we train a cookie to clean stall # 4?

And Kivalens seems often quite temperamental and frequently argues with me about my sorting criteria. Recently it has been so angry with me that it will no longer allow me to loan through it using Chrome or Firefox (it hides the selection box from me in a fit of pique) but it likes going on Safari, so I still can use it well enough. I suspect I have not been feeding it enough apples.

I had some issues with kivalens - load a bunch of loans and try to transfer, but only a handful were showing up in my basket! It was very odd, and got to the point where I ended up choosing on kivalens and finding them again to select on kiva. Its ok for 10-12 loans, but beyond that it gets crazy!

I have had it work for as many as 800 loans several times, but it took 5-10 minutes to load.

My repayments also exceeded 100% of estimated. My delinquencies are down from 52 loans to 22 and the percentage is down from over 2% to just 1.16%. Four of the delinquent loans are behind by less than a dollar.

Time to start lending again.

Just added 18 loans. Daaaag 800 loans is nuts. I wish there was a add to basket button, I might not be awake enough to see it. I wonder if I can top 800.....

Y'all are lucky... I got just 78.4% of my estimated repayments so far.

My delinquents reduced however from 8 to 6 loans.

It usually takes a few days for repayments to post.
I had some more post this am and I expect the remaining one to post in the next days.

Most of the borrowers that have not paid back this month are in Africa. South Sudan, Burundi, DCR (2), Rwanda and one in Mexico. Some have no payments.
One Turkey loan is 4 months in arrears after paying the first two months off.

I hope that they are all ok, and this is a bump in the road for them.

A comment from those who said that they got >100% expected repayments. I see there are some where the borrower has not paid, others where the FP has not paid.

And it is worse than it really looks, as there are a few that have overpaid for the next few months.

Since I joined Kiva in March of 2011, over 50% of the moneys loaned have been repaid. My average stated loan life is 11.19 months, but many loans have scheduled repayments of a month or more less. Of the loans still out, the average remaining life is just 6.32 months. By keeping the average life of remaining loans short, my repayments are higher and there is more to re-lend..

If on your portfolio page you click on the Available Kiva Credit near the upper right, you will get some interesting statistics.

My repayments now up to 80% of expected.
Delinquency rate has dropped below 20% by number, still 10% by value.

In better news, some red loans I funded before my previous flight got fully funded. It is now 12 hours since my last refund for an expired loan.

I'd be interested to hear whether there's going to be more transparency with the Field Partner Risk Rating, from those who have been in contact with Kiva staff and attended the Do.

Some of the star ratings just don't seem justified.

For example, I'm scratching my head as to how VCF in Rawanda (with good loans expiring soon - help appreciated!) can have a 3-star ranking with Deliquency, At-Risk, and Default rates of 0.00% while ACCION Texas has 3.5 stars with an default rate of 17.36%.

My hypotheses are that history matters, and that VCF might have had a history of delinquent loans that were later paid up, or that the geopolitical history of the country/region matters.

I see the dimensions and sub-dimensions listed in the pop-up What is the Field Partner Risk Rating? I would be interested to know what these dimensions and sub-dimensions are.

As I commented after the call, greater transparency about potential risk is a very welcome development.

The explanation on VFC's page is not very helpful.

I assume Kiva ratings take into account the risk management of the MFI amongst other factors. The default rates etc presumably are only for the loans successfully funded through Kiva - which may or may not be representative.

One issue is that Kiva is only one source of funding for all of these MFIs. For some of them, Kiva may be a very small source of funding.

Thanks for that tip, KyRoamer. That's a new way of looking at my lending history.

If you click on the Lend $25 button on the loan page, you are taken straight to the basket. (You can also use the drop-down menu to choose a different amount than $25).

If you click on the Lend $25 button on the loan list, it adds the loan to the basket, and replaces the Lend button with a Checkout button which you can use to go to the basket, or you can carry on.

That is a common argument made by some. In recent expiries a number of FP's have had more than 20% of their funding coming from Kiva and have also had more than 25% of the posted loans expire unfunded. That is serious! There were highly misleading posts about this in other threads, copied here. The commenter had not actually counted the number of posted loans vs expiries, nor the total Kiva funding divided by total funding in the same period. That lack of analysis trivializes what is a very serious problem for many FP's. Kiva has become well aware of that issue.

The combination of a sticky for last loan option display, solving the basketing problem and making push notifications to past lenders to expiring laons are all finally happening, but we are still having expiries today, just after repayments, to several FP's including popular ones. Ask Microfinanzas Prisma what they think.