P2P lending survey: Platforms, recent advances and prospects

P2P lending is an emerging Internet-based application where individuals can directly borrow money from each other. The past decade has witnessed the rapid development and prevalence of online P2P lending platforms, examples of which include Prosper, LendingClub, and Kiva. Meanwhile, extensive research has been done that mainly focuses on the studies of platform mechanisms and transaction data. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on the research about P2P lending, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first focused effort in this field. Specifically, we first provide a systematic taxonomy for P2P lending by summarizing different types of mainstream platforms and comparing their working mechanisms in detail. Then, we review and organize the recent advances on P2P lending from various perspectives (e.g., economics and sociology perspective, and data-driven perspective). Finally, we propose our opinions on the prospects of P2P lending and suggest some future research directions in this field. Meanwhile, throughout this paper, some analysis on real-world data collected from Prosper and Kiva are also conducted.