Orca Product Roadmap - opinion request

Hey,


Thank you to the 36 people who took the time to complete the survey. It’s a big help to us.

We’re keen to share the results with you which you can find via the link below.

Orca Survey Results

There were a couple of points that we thought were particularly interesting. Firstly, the results imply that investors would like to invest across multiple P2P platforms from the one platform. If this is something that is of interest to you it would good to gain your views on how you imagine this working? Happy to speak to you directly on this but it would be great to see a discussion emerge.

Something surprising for us was that investors would expect to pay for P2P research and portfolio monitoring, but wouldn’t expect to pay for an investment execution service. This has countered one of our assumptions that retail investors would only pay a third party for execution capabilities. Any comments on this would be again welcome.

The survey is still open so if anyone that hasn’t completed the questionnaire wishes to add their voice they can access the survey via the link below. Should take around 7 mins.

Orca P2P Questionnaire

A bigger sample set will provide better results which we will of course share.

If you want to get in touch with me directly my email is ‘iain@orcamoney.com.’

Cheers,

Iain

Have left email notifications on for now but not been impressed with any info that has come through from Orca

Hi

Referrals are not our driver. We actually stopped taking advertising revenue at the end of March as we felt it compromised our independent analysis which we are promoting to the IFA market. We may go back to the advertising/ affiliate model in the future depending on how successful we are with the IFAs. 

The reason for not including other debt based debentures was because we wanted to stay true to P2P. It's been an internal debate for a while. Your comment has swayed the debate!

I've now added an additional IFISA table to include other debt based debentures. I've also updated with the P2P table to include a couple of additional P2P platforms, covering the whole market. You can see this via the link below:

www.orcamoney.com/innovative-finance-isa

One product that I know of which isn't on the other lists that you provided is the Advancr Bond offered by Triple Point. Offers 5.1%- 6.2% over 1-3 years. Might be of interest - advancr.com/


Thanks for the feedback. 

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Let me know if you have any comments regarding the questionnaire. It would be appreciated. 

Thanks, Iain 

With respect, it would be of interest to know what is your "driver" then?

I would be more than willing to help if I knew it would lead to a tool that would help in the future. However your survey suggests you might be looking to sell us something (ie use the information gathered to target a product)?

Maybe you could also introduce Orca, who is behind it and what you are hoping to achieve?

I am not adverse to new products, I am just not clear what Orca is?
 

Hi Stevio,

Good to hear from you. I understand where you are coming from and I'm more than happy to introduce Orca. 

About Orca:

We've been operating in the alternative lending industry for around 3 years. Before starting Orca we were involved in a retail bond issuing business where we learnt alot about the industry, made some decent contacts and became big believers in peer to peer lending as an asset class. In December 2015 we set out on our own, launching a simple comparison service which compared P2P platforms and all last year we wrote blogs driving traffic to the site. This allowed us to earn a little advertising revenue before raising an equity investment from a small VC and a number of private angels. This investment is how our business is currently funded and has relaxed our immediate revenue ambitions. 

At the end of March we launched a more in-depth analytics platform, aimed at retail investors and IFAs. We're still developing this platform and will add a further 8 analysed P2P platforms to our current 3 by the end of the summer. Essentially we scape data from 24 P2P platforms and run cashflow analysis on the loan books of the platforms to produce standardised metrics. 

Orca Team:

The Orca team consists of four full time team members and a further 4 semi full time contractors. You can find our profiles below. 
    
I am CEO (Iain)                                             

Jordan leads BD                                        

John leads Development                             

Samantha joined the team last month to develop our investment product offering         

We also have a partnership with Dublin City University (DCU). DCU and I devised the methodology for analysing the P2P platforms with results displayed on the Orca platform.

Our Driver:

Generally we're driven by the P2P market. We believe in this asset class and we want to spread the adoption of P2P. We view our role as driving this adoption by providing the tools, research and products to help investors. 

Our approach is 'value first, monetise later'. We run a extremely lean business keeping costs as low as possible while continually adding value to our tech platform and growing our user base. If we can build products that are useful to retail investors we'll monetise later. Our believe is that the P2P market is still in its infancy and will continue to grow which will create opportunities. Please note we see members of the P2P Independent Forum as early adopters in the market and people with a valued opinion, not an opportunity to make quick revenue. Hopefully this will help us build better products. 

Future Product Plans 

Once we've fully settled on our product roadmap I'm keen to share this with the forum to invite comments but essentially are plans are as follows:

1. Complete the analysis listed on the Orca Platform (end of summer)
2. Add some form of Portfolio Monitoring tool allowing investors to connect up their accounts to the Orca site. This will allow for the performance of the portfolio to be viewed.
3. Launch an Investment Product enabling investors to quickly diversify across a number of P2P opportunities 

Excellent. All thats left to do now is pop the cheque for my consultancy fee in the post

I've just checked and the form is collecting emails it's just that the front facing website is not showing this has occurred successfully. I'll get this updated. Thanks