This thread is intended to let lenders know about a risk-tolerance based search app I wrote, to announce updates, and to gather suggestions, complaints, problems or comments. You enter your risk comfort level and search the loans that are currently in "fundraising" status. The results are sorted by which ones are paid off first so that you can either re-lend or just to not have your money tied up for long periods in case you need relatively easy access to it.
The search screen:
The results:
And if you noticed the "
Analyze Lender (beta)" link in the search screen, you can have it analyze your portfolio.
Since the amounts you lend are not public, for the repayment calculations it assumes a $25 loan. The two bottom graphs show how exposed the "in repayment" loans in your portfolio are to currency risk and non-payment. The URL changes as you put in different usernames, so you can bookmark it and it'll automatically pull up your analysis whenever you click it again without having to retype anything.
When I was playing around with the API I noticed that there was a "non-payment liability" field which shows up nowhere on Kiva's loan pages and I felt it was incredibly valuable information. The idea for this app came out of discussion in my lending group about "Everybody Lend Day" and how to select a loan that everyone in the group could feel comfortable getting behind, safety and turn-around were the main concerns so I went about finding the best way to find those loans. It evolved into what it is now over time, it started much simpler but only able to run on my machine.
My goal with this app wasn't necessarily that everyone only make safe loans, but that you can feel a little bit more confident about moving
more money into kiva into the ultra safe, quick turnaround loans -- but still hopefully do some more of the risky ones as well... which allows lenders to treat kiva more like a savings account.
If you have any problems or suggestions for the app, please post them to this thread, I'm constantly updating it and love to know what it's missing or what you like about it to guide the future development.
Some features I have planned are:
1) Pictures (added 9/30/09)
2) Full Text showing
3) "Add to basket" inside the app itself (added 9/30/09)
4) Make it even faster. (added 9/28/09)
5) Optionally exclude results if you've already lent to them
It requires the one-time installation of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in (it's like Flash) and will work in Firefox, IE, Chrome (and works on both Mac and PC). Silverlight is relatively new, but a rapidly growing user base and more apps are being written for it all the time.
Here's my application
http://www.nuclearspike.com/kivaEnjoy!
[Extra details for those interested: For speed, it caches the kiva data (why it asks to store 10MB). The app first pulls back all fund-raising loans and caches the results for 5 minutes. This includes the name, sector, loan amount, still needed, etc. Subsequent queries just filter the data it already has until the 5 minutes is up then it refetches it fresh. After it whittles down the massive list to the partners and loans that meet your requirements it must go and fetch the detailed individual loan data for the finalists. This data includes the final repayment (for sorting) and the currency exchange and non-payment liability to further exclude any of the remaining loans and for sorting. The data it displays from these detailed queries is unchanging and is cached for 14 days.]
