Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending Risk Management: Assessing Credit Risk on Social Lending Platforms Using Textual Factors

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms offer Internet users the possibility to borrow money from peers without the intervention of traditional financial institutions. Due to the anonymity on such social lending platforms, determining the creditworthiness of borrowers is of high importance. Beyond the disclosure of traditional financial variables that enable risk assessment, peer-to-peer lending platforms offer the opportunity to reveal additional information on the loan purpose. We investigate whether this self-disclosed information is used to show reliability and to outline creditworthiness of platform participants. We analyze more than 70,000 loans funded at a leading social lending platform. We show that linguistic and content-based factors help to explain a loan's probability of default and that content-based factors are more important than linguistic variables. Surprisingly, not every information provided by borrowers underlines creditworthiness. Instead, certain aspects rather indicate a higher probability of default. Our study provides important insights on information disclosure in the context of peer-to-peer lending, shows how to increase performance in credit scoring and is highly relevant for the stakeholders on social lending platforms.