Investors who want to use their self-directed IRAs to invest in peer-to-peer loans through Prosper can use Millennium Trust Co. to custody those accounts, the company announced Thursday.
Investors can use IRA funds custodied with Millennium Trust to finance consumers' loans and collect interest.
"We are an exchange for credit where people with cash and people with debt can meet," Ron Suber, president of Prosper Marketplace, told ThinkAdvisor on Monday. "We've chosen Millennium Trust to be the IRA custodian to those lenders with cash that have IRA accounts that would like to make loans or investments in the borrowers' debt."
Suber said the decision to use Millennium Trust as the custodian was based on their "commitment to customer service and quality and very thorough documentation in a reasonable amount of time."
Reggie Karas, managing director of the alternative solutions group at Millennium Trust, noted the firm has extensive expertise in that industry. "Self-directed IRAs are Millennium's specialty," she said on Monday. "We specialize in the custody of alternatives of all different asset classes; however, one of the things that we bring to the table is very early on we entered into the custody of electronic notes and loans. We have been working in that space for quite a while. We spent an awful lot of time learning and understanding the space and the business and the investors, both on the individual and the institutional side."