Two BIG steps for the Kiva website

If you’re a follower of Matt’s blog at all, what we’re doing today is old news to you:
http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/kiva-chronicles/archive/2008/08/26/liquidity-and-community

He’s explained what we’re doing far better than I ever could. To summarize what’s going on over the next couple days, we’re rolling out two new features which we think are good news for the Kiva website and for lenders:

1) Partial repayments

Until now, lenders had to wait until their loan completed its entire term before receiving one repayment that represented all of the money they had lent. From this point forward, we’re changing that so that Kiva Lenders will receive funds as they are paid back to Kiva. So, if Kiva receives a repayment for a loan and your percentage of the loan entitles you to $3.12 of that repayment, we will return that $3.12 to you immediately rather than waiting for your loan to come to term. This is nice from a lender perspective because lenders no longer have to wait as long before they receive repayments. Our aim here is to give lenders more to do on the site since they’ll have money to re-lend (or gift or withdraw or take some action on) more often. Plus, it’s just nice to get your money back faster.

2) Lending Teams & Community

Nick actually wrote a great blog post about this a few weeks ago, and now it’s official:
http://kivanews.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-lending-teams-feature.html

Our goal with this feature is to give lenders a new tool to share their Kiva experience with their own communities. It also helps showcase that Kiva itself is an emerging community: we’re all here because of a shared belief that ordinary people can actually make a difference in lessening the world’s poverty. That’s what makes Kiva such an amazing experience; it’s what brings new lenders to our site every day and it’s what makes this such an extraordinary community. Thanks for being a part of it.

Enjoy the new features and happy lending!


Note: You'll notice your loans repaid might be doing some crazy math through the end of the day, because of some logic that we're doing to make sure you correctly get all of the money you're entitled to. This should be resolved by end of day. Thanks for your patience.