Consider increasing your interest rates?

I would like to invest myself with Unbolted - diversification and all that but hand on heart not at the rates on offer especially as you do have MT and FS floating around. Good idea about some sort of provision fund and appreciate valuations aren't always an exact science but as they (Unbolted), are the 'experts' then in a perfect world there shouldn't really need to be a provision fund in place.

My tuppence worth FWIW is that Unbolted will always be a fringe player unless they increase their rates to lenders or MT/FS reduce their ROI.

Snap, very happy with Unbolted and I would up my investment 5-10 times if the rates matched MT and FS but I don't think that increasing the rate has crossed their mind after all they don't have a big problem with loans not being filled at the moment. My biggest concern with Unbolted is how many more loans do they need to bring on to make a profit and therefore be a successful platform in the long term. If they increase loan volumes then they may need to look at ways to increase the number of investors.

Thank you for the feedback. On the interest rates, I would just make a couple of points:

1. We allocate 1% of each loan to a provision fund that protects against principal losses. If we removed this allocation, our interest rates would be a little higher than 12% on our unhedged loans. However, we feel very strongly that a provision fund is critical to our model for a couple of reasons. One, we would like to provide a level of protection even to those lenders who do not hold diversified portfolios. Two, many of the assets backing the loans can exhibit significant price volatility in some economic environments. Although we are operating in a benign environment right now, we would like to provide some protection against asset price volatility even when we cannot hedge against them (as we can for gold and silver).
2. Our loans backed by gold and silver pay 0.65% per month only because it costs us 1.5-2% to hedge against a fall in gold or silver prices. On these loans, you are protected by the hedge for both the principal and six months interest.

However we may conclude, if the provision fund builds up, that we are allocating too high an amount to it. If so, rates may go up.

On business, we are doing very well. The growth in January has been significantly above expectations and we have a fair number of new initiatives with which we will bring different types of loans with a risk-return profile that none of our competitors currently offer - hopefully we can share details with you in a month or so.