Bankers Bonuses and Iron Maiden

How can we fill our boots - we have to keep them on...

I sincerely think you should slow down your investment process.  I reject more than half the deals I see and yet I have over 400 loans built up over the past year (and it took the whole year to get there)  A feed of loans come in fits and starts and clearly some P2P are getting no new business, giving new business to institutions or are getting business where the risk/rewards are out of kilter.

Don't rush it or you will end up with all the c@p.

Justto see if we agree on the market flavour,

1) FC the risks do not match the rewards
2) AC don't have any new deals and their new mechs are swallowing up the existing deals
3) SS I'm in for 40% of their pipeline loans and as details come through that will only go down
4) FS avoiding art, some property and anything to do with flood-able property
5) MT avoiding art, and filling up fast on managed accounts

You have to think through what you never want to be involved with and keep away from them.

SS not that exciting, the only good news is they have recently made a major improvement in the software and their deals tend to be bigger so can absorb more loans, but note that the bigger they are....

The coming trouble is that FC is going down a different route to the other players and using more automated risk management tools.  They can do this because they have more data than everyone else.  The trouble is that they are expensive to use and cost the lenders too much (there is a word for what they do, but think Bull and Cow), this is distorting the market and there is now no time to read the B@@lsh@t that they write about the deals.  This squeezes out a bunch of borrowers to work with the other P2P portals and you these tend to

pawn deals
portal developed mechanisms (MT), a truly original idea for this market
very large property loans
aircraft (don't talk to me about aircraft)

I don't think being sensible on the phone is a sure fire way of selecting a portal.  They have to do everything right to get my vote and so far only one is achieving that.  Even AC (whose phone practice is perfect) fail on so many counts.

Loans come down....

I think management charges need to come down, this whole 1% here and 1% is old hat and went out with the bankers.  If you look at how FC quality bands have changed proportions since they went to the new model you can already see that quality control is open to inflation.

TBH, I think they know damn well that lack of demand is not their problem. If they lose a potential investor through not spending time they could be spending on attempting to increase supply? Hey-ho.

I'm not really the pre-investment chat type, and I don't tend to phone P2P companies as most are quite small and I figure email gives them the opportunity to respond as best suits them.

Although I have never felt the need to phone them I must disagree with your comment about SS. I have been investing with SS for almost two years, they have my largest single P2P holding, and I think their service is brilliant. I have never had to wait more than a few hours for a response to any query, and if there has been anything to sort out it gets done straight away. 

Just to add some perspective I have also found RS, MT, AC and Wellesley have also responded well to any issues or queries (not invested with anyone else yet). In general, given their size the P2P companies I have dealt with do a pretty good job on the customer service side, and although most have at times had to grapple with the side-effects of their developing systems, they admit and rectify mistakes pretty quickly.

Where's it all going? Not sure I could guess, but I think early adopters may be the 'lucky' ones, as I think one thing's pretty certain, it will all look quite different in a year's time.