duck
Member of DD Central
Posts: 2,594
Likes: 5,795
|
Post by duck on Jan 23, 2016 11:21:45 GMT
Appreciate the points you have made bracknellboy and agree that you will never please everybody.
That said I'm really thinking longer term than the current minor 'issues' with the aim of seeing MT continue to grow. I didn't enjoy seeing the large loan offer being pulled back in November (correct decision though) but with the current lender base that was always going to be a big shout. If loans such as that one are to be attracted and filled there has to be a level of confidence that the cash is 'out there' and investors keen to invest. If there is a level of discouragement (e.g. I can invest in that one large loan but none of the others) I doubt if new investors would join. Even worse would be for investors to dip a toe, find it impossible to invest a reasonable amount/diversify and then depart.
As always the cash/deal balance is a difficult one to get right and I agree that % monitoring/adjusting is probably the best way forwards currently but in the long term with growth in mind I'm not so certain.
|
|
webwiz
Posts: 1,133
Likes: 210
|
Post by webwiz on Jan 23, 2016 11:54:37 GMT
Seems pretty simple to me. The 1% max is now too high for loans below some level of loan value assuming that the objective is to at least stretch out availability to 24hrs + some small delta. MT have the data to work out approximately where that is. Loans below that leve but above some level which would otherwise leave everyone dealing in shrapnel should have the max bid restriction reduced to some new percentage. Again, MT have the data to make a good guess at what that should be. I'd suggest though that the floor should be no lower than £50. Occassionaly the max will be 'wrong' fior that loan and the hangover after 24 hours will be more than a small delta simply because of the loan characteristics. However history suggests that won't be a problem for MT has the excess will get mopped up PDQ. This is a simple model and requires no pre-funding shenanigans or sw development to support. It just needs monitoring and tuning. One can argue whether it should be 24 hours or 48 hours or even 12 hours, but the principle is pretty reasonable. Sounds like a good interim solution. In the longer term it would save Ed a lot of time if it was automated even if that did involve some Shuangigans.
|
|
james
Posts: 2,205
Likes: 955
|
Post by james on Jan 23, 2016 17:12:43 GMT
The smaller loans, sub £300k do get snapped up fairly quickly but how many lenders would be happy to accept a £25 or £50 portion? Looks like 15 loans in the last month so £50 corresponds to investing £750 a month, £25 to £325 and £5 to £75. Most people would probably be quite content at £75 a month given the income level of most households and the need to diversify across platforms. Posters here tend not to be most people but rather those with higher income and/or more money to invest. Of course anyone can have existing capital to invest but even there most people won't have the sort of levels that I and many other posters have to work with. The bigger deals would provide the opportunity to get the larger amounts invested. I'm happy to have restrictions that favour those who really do have little money to invest, since I take a societal view that it's desirable to do so and encourage and reward those on lower incomes investing. What I wouldn't do is set an alarm clock to get up in the middle of the night for a £5 investment per loan, something I did to participate in this batch of loans - at max - and almost always will have to do if the bid limit doesn't genuinely allow at least four hours of time to get invested. Others would need more time than that. Time convenience and lower limits is a win for me given the high non-financial cost of a short bid window.
|
|
james
Posts: 2,205
Likes: 955
|
Post by james on Jan 23, 2016 17:27:40 GMT
That said I'm really thinking longer term than the current minor 'issues' with the aim of seeing MT continue to grow. I didn't enjoy seeing the large loan offer being pulled back in November (correct decision though) but with the current lender base that was always going to be a big shout.
If loans such as that one are to be attracted and filled there has to be a level of confidence that the cash is 'out there' and investors keen to invest. If there is a level of discouragement (e.g. I can invest in that one large loan but none of the others) I doubt if new investors would join. Indeed. An expectation that you will be able to get some level of money regularly invested, even if less than you would like, is important. If that's £5 a deal lots of people and most posters here would like more but it is still getting money invested and providing an ongoing reason to stick around and be available for the bigger deals. Some who have relatively large amounts wouldn't find say £5 a deal enough to stick around but it'd do the job for many. For those with more money the ability to filter notifications to deals expected to close with a per-person investment amount above a threshold that they can set might well be helpful, just to increase their time efficiency so they only need to look at things that might interest them. Some even with less money would just prefer fewer but larger amounts per loan and might well like that as well. The lack of rules and pre-bidding is another filter here - human time cost filter - that will discourage some with larger amounts on the basis that it's not worth their time. Tailored notifications can help this group. Longer term, I already have decided that barring something unusual I am always going to want to invest in certain classes of loan to MoneyThing to fund their lending, based on who MoneyThing is lending to. Rules that would make an offer at a level I set for each class - MT's borrower unique ID - with me having time to override that would be a nice convenience feature. Today the lack isn't painful due to deal flow levels but that's relative to the time cost thresholds for each person vs amount lent per loan and each person will have a different "not worth the time to do it by hand on Moneything's schedule" threshold. This paragraph is in essence looking forward to a day when there are significantly higher deal flow counts here. In the shorter term MoneyThing can do what it did with this last batch, several loans at once, so more work can be done with one human time allocation.
|
|
spiral
Member of DD Central
Posts: 910
Likes: 456
|
Post by spiral on Jan 24, 2016 9:43:55 GMT
Although personally, I'm not usually inconvenienced by a 4pm start. I do see the benefits of sharing the spoils even if personally, that is to my detriment.
My idea would be to start the bids at 10am, limit to 0.1% per hour, but permit your full funding from the outset (not earlier, but at the start time) with the system automatically adding your future bids in every hour until the loan is full or your requirement is met.
e.g a 100K loan would permit £100 per hour. I want to invest £500 so place this offer at 10am. £100 gets immediately matched with £400 pre offered. At 11am the system adds another £100 for me without me needing any further intervention. By 2pm, I'm fully funded but with 1000 investors on the platform, even if everyone wanted the maximum, it would still take 10 hours to fill thus giving ample time for everyone to get at least some part of the pie.
You could even set it up so that someone that can't get to bid until 2pm could make their back payments immediately thus adding £500 immediately with further £100 for subsequent hours. This would mean that anyone logging in in the first 10 hours would be able to get the same amount as someone logging in at 10am.
|
|
paulg
Member of DD Central
Posts: 312
Likes: 189
|
Post by paulg on Jan 24, 2016 12:22:14 GMT
Although personally, I'm not usually inconvenienced by a 4pm start. I do see the benefits of sharing the spoils even if personally, that is to my detriment. My idea would be to start the bids at 10am, limit to 0.1% per hour, but permit your full funding from the outset (not earlier, but at the start time) with the system automatically adding your future bids in every hour until the loan is full or your requirement is met. e.g a 100K loan would permit £100 per hour. I want to invest £500 so place this offer at 10am. £100 gets immediately matched with £400 pre offered. At 11am the system adds another £100 for me without me needing any further intervention. By 2pm, I'm fully funded but with 1000 investors on the platform, even if everyone wanted the maximum, it would still take 10 hours to fill thus giving ample time for everyone to get at least some part of the pie. You could even set it up so that someone that can't get to bid until 2pm could make their back payments immediately thus adding £500 immediately with further £100 for subsequent hours. This would mean that anyone logging in in the first 10 hours would be able to get the same amount as someone logging in at 10am. It seems to me that this would have a similar result as an SS style bottom-up prefunding model but with a 1% of loan maximum prefund. It would be less time-convenient than the prefund model because you would still need to be into the loan early in the day in case it filled in less than 10 hours, and I could end up with 10 loan parts to manage instead of one. Edit: If 1000 investors all wanted the maximum the loan could fill in an hour.
|
|
webwiz
Posts: 1,133
Likes: 210
|
Post by webwiz on Jan 24, 2016 18:23:48 GMT
How about a system somehow giving priority to funds committed. There would be a new item on the account holding uninvested funds which could not be withdrawn. This would provide extra profitability to MT and would enable those who were willing, to tie up their cash without interest in order to get priority in the allocation. There would be a lot of detail to be worked out so at this stage I am just testing the reaction to see if the idea has any traction. I know Ed would be concerned that lenders might buy something unsuitable but this is easily addressed by giving these lenders the right to sell their loans back to MT.
|
|
ben
Posts: 2,020
Likes: 589
|
Post by ben on Jan 24, 2016 18:37:21 GMT
I think they are all to complicated the easiest way would be just to reduce the maximum for first 24 hours. I think it will only be a problem for the smaller loans as at the moment still takes awhile for the bigger loans to fill
|
|