A reward for early investors

There are various options in how you could use this idea to provide some reward for early investors who spread the word (foolishly, as it turns out, as the platform has become so popular!) at no cost to MT apart from some programming.

You could provide a facility whereby current investors, or maybe early investors, could, if they wish, ask for interest received to be re-invested as soon as possible. (This assumes that you stay with the same model as present, 12% pa for 6 month loans). When a new loan becomes available, before it is open for investment in the normal way the system would check to see which investors who had chosen this option had cash in their account and allocate it it to the loan, maybe adhering to the bid limit if any. If the option is so popular that there may be more cash available than the amount of the loan then some form of rationing will be required. For example: Call the Loan amount L and the number opted in N. Divide L by N, call the result A. Now total the spare cash of these investors whose spare cash holding is less than A, call the number B and the total C, and allocate all the spare cash of these investors to the loan. Now iterate: Divide L-C by N-B etc. If this is too complicated then only consider those accounts where the spare cash is more than the bid limit and allocate the bid limit or, if necessary, a fraction of it to the loan. This may mean that someone who has less than the bid limit but more than the figure arrived at, misses out, but I think it's acceptable.

If you made the option available to all current investors you could remove the sign-up option once everyone had a chance to opt in. If, as I would prefer, you restricted the facility to investors who had joined before some specified date, then the display of the option would only be shown to those investors. In either case a method of opting out would have to be displayed only to those opted in.

This option would not be attractive to everyone. Some people will want to micro manage their investments, but it will suit those many of us and will minimise the time when our funds are not earning.

Zopa make no secret  of the fact that they charge early investors half of that for those joining after a certain date. Did not seem to do them any harm. I don't object to paying twice as much. Early investors arguably take on more risk than those who wait for the platform to get solidly established. Most people understand this. Maybe you have a point about it being secret, perhaps it should be made clear to everyone.