Where do I go in the queue?

I was gonna ask today, but forgot amongst all the lending and recruiting! Bit I know it isn't urgent, just  of interest so I'll ask next week (I don't know the answer, never thought of the question before!)

Kevin.

Consider a £10 loan part in the 5 year market at 4%. The final repayment will be about 20p capital and 0.05p interest. RS's fee is 10% of interest, so they'd be taking 0.005p. So, to keep rounding errors acceptable you'd probably want to be able to keep track of 0.00001p so 5 or 6 decimal places would be the minimum, but I expect RS and probably Zopa use floating point representation internally anyway so it only matters when data is presented in human-readable form.

Presumably, fractional pence repayments are rolled up until they reach 1p. In the example above you'd expect about 1p interest from the last 5 months, so presumably you'd get 4 months of nothing then a bumper 1p interest payment on the final repayment.

'the payment before fee reduction'.......

Yes and I wish they'd show 'the payment after fee reduction'.

Queues....

The placement of people's order in the queue for reinvested payments wasn't designed with a specific methodology. However the code processes the loan repayment by order of loan original open date. So the older the loan from which the repayment comes from the nearer the front you are. It gets a little more complicated because all lender reinvestments from different loans are amalgamated. This all go to their front place, so some mini queue jumping goes on.

This queue ordering is largely irrelevant, certainly for the rolling monthly money. And even the longer term markets such as the 5-yr will probably be lent same day at that market rate. No waiting, unlent funds or OLO guesswork with RateSetter.

So what eventually happens is that lenders who have been lending the longest are most likely to be at the front. It wasn't designed to be this way, but a nice bi-product. Other than this, once your money starts gettting on lots of different loans through reinvestment, the more random things become. Although thanks to the queue jump, the more loans you have participated in the more likely you are to be at the front. Nice outcome as well!

Kevin.