Blended Payments, at last

We're rolling out a release that the Kiva team is very excited about this week, and we hope it will excite you, too. I'll list the highlights:

• Blended Payments: Lenders can now pay using a combination of their Kiva Credit and a PayPal transaction. In the past, you could only really use one or the other (so if your transaction amount exceeded your Kiva Credit, you couldn't really use your Kiva Credit). That's fixed now. While fixing it, we made some changes to clean up the overall checkout flow.


• We made some changes to our "Pay the Rent" page during the checkout flow to make it a little more informative about what is going on inside of Kiva. Donations covered the majority of our operating budget last year. It goes without saying, then, that they're crucial to making sure we can continue reaching entrepreneurs in need of funding.


• A number of lenders have requested the ability to sort by repayment term on the lend tab. So, we listened to you and will be adding this new sort option.


• Finally, remember that cool "Latest Loan" widget on the Kiva Home page? Well, we just made it a little bit cooler by extending it to also show when an entrepreneur has fully repaid a loan. The new title of the widget is "Latest Activity."

So, as you can see, there are a lot of improvements going out on the Kiva site in the next couple of days. Stay tuned, the release should be up soon!