Investor
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Post by Investor on May 30, 2014 18:36:12 GMT
Not sure if anyone else in the Forum was at FCHQ (not to be confused with GCHQ) yesterday evening however there were some discussions about capacity, reliability and resilience of the infrastructure. Would not want to misquote anything said by any FC staff so will simply give my impression of the feedback I received. IMHO I believe that given the various changes and upgrades, the system still has some legacy coding that needs to be addressed and is likely to be part of the ongoing issues. I did feel that FC were quite frank and forthcoming in accepting this and were certainly committed to working towards resolving the outstanding issues whilst also looking to deliver some additional enhancements to the UI especially around the loan and SM filtering capability and visual aspects of the interface. These are purely my thoughts around the topics as I saw them and in no way are the expected to reflect any inference from any FC staff. I can however absolutely confirm that whilst the nibbles were to an exceptional standard, the cheese board did show a summary lack of imagination and should be reviewed, with immediate plans put in place to a full upgrade to that element of the evening.
And my thanks to the FC team for a warm welcome and a useful overview of the company and processes.
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Investor
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Lendy (L) in Administration
New Loans
May 30, 2014 16:05:40 GMT
via mobile
Post by Investor on May 30, 2014 16:05:40 GMT
As an aside and I admit totally off topic but did anyone happen to be in and around the Ludgate Hill area of London between 5 and 8 pm yesterday evening. Please ignore or moderate if this post makes no sense.
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Investor
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Lendy (L) in Administration
New Loans
May 30, 2014 15:57:55 GMT
via mobile
Post by Investor on May 30, 2014 15:57:55 GMT
Have to concur with that. Now need to take the funds back out again! However still don't think there is a better option than 'fastest finger first'. Not sure if the max allowance is any more fair than that. Will just have to monitor emails more closely. Loan is now actually at -1.25% funded so someone will be receiving an email from SS apologising that their £200 did not make the cut but that they are introducing a system to ensure "this never happens again".
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Investor
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Lendy (L) in Administration
New Loans
May 23, 2014 13:17:27 GMT
Post by Investor on May 23, 2014 13:17:27 GMT
Sold out. About 70 minutes to fund a 50k loan. What does this tell the guys at SS about the supply and demand curve, and their customers diversity requirements, when the larger loans still have significant funding available. As if they didn't already know ;-)
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Investor
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Lendy (L) in Administration
New Loans
May 23, 2014 12:10:31 GMT
Post by Investor on May 23, 2014 12:10:31 GMT
New loan now available £50000 at 37% LTV. You heard it here first.......
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Investor
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Post by Investor on May 2, 2014 11:45:22 GMT
Thanks for the info RR.
In my little experiment £500 was paid in by FPS/BACS and £500 by GoCardless, both paid in at exactly 19:27 yesterday, the GoCardless was available immediately and was invested, the Bank payment became available for investment at 10:03 today, by which time most of the loans had gone. Appreciate it was 'out of hours' but believe many investors may be more active evenings and weekends. Interestingly when I did invest, there was a minor glitch on the system but as seems true to form with SS, I very quickly received communication from them resolving the issue.
Possibly as SS continues to grow, given their desire to reduce cash processing costs (GoCardless) and yet the inherent, and quite significant advantage to lenders of this method over BACS, the debit card payment method may become more pressing a requirement to aid this growth and allow investors to login, review loans, pay in, lend out and log out in a single session.
SS, if you are reading this thanks for the prompt response (seemed to be only fractions of a millisecond!)
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Investor
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Post by Investor on May 1, 2014 18:22:28 GMT
Dear SS
With the new SM market obviously now very much in play, either the ability to sort the Live Loans page by percentage available, or even to have a filter button that removes all 0% (fully funded) loans would be very useful, especially as the number of loans on the page grows. Another one to add to your no doubt growing list of snags, requests and updates.
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Investor
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Post by Investor on May 1, 2014 17:50:38 GMT
And just to test that my memory was correct I have paid in via GoCardless, money was there instantly, and I was able to pick up a part of RR's sale. At least we will now how much of a delay this puts on the payment to seller time. RR - will pick up any surplus if it is still there later
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Investor
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Post by Investor on May 1, 2014 17:41:48 GMT
Thanks SSInvestor for the sentiments. We feel there will definitely be a development curve for this secondary market. We identified an issue where a seller sucessfully sells their loan part, but to a buyer who has funded their account via GoCardless and the funds haven't cleared into SS account yet. This means that if the seller requests a withdrawal there would be a delay in processing this withdrawal until the buyer's funds clear from GoCardless. Ideally we would like to remove the GoCardless offering as it is expensive (for Lendy) and has lengthy time delays. However this would rely solely on FPS/BACS transfers until we could arrange debit card deposits and we are aware of how much our investors like the convenience of the GoCardless facility. However as you experience it as a selling investor, you may start to experience the negative aspects of the GoCardless facility. As general feedback from an investors perspective, I have found that FPS (even from Barclays) is often not as F as it is supposed to be. A transfer in today from my account took about 2-3 hours until it was available on the site for me to use. I have found historically that given the lending speed for some of the smaller loans I often find myself in a situation where I receive a 'new loan available' email, transfer the relevant investment in via FPS and then hope that some of the loan is left once the money has hit the site. Given that loans come up fairly infrequently at this stage, I am not keen on leaving funds available for investment awaiting a new loan. I think I have only made one payment via the GoCardless system and if memory serves that was available immediately for investment so seemed like I would be more likely to 'get in' on that loan, however I also appreciate the cost to you and your request to make larger payments (5K+) via BACS, so have avoided using the GoCardless system. I do use debit card deposits on most of my other P2P accounts and find that funds are generally immediately available so certainly will be a much better route for getting the money through the 'bank to borrower' cycle in the most effective way possible. Just my tuppence worth and the sentiments are well earned. Keep up the good work
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Investor
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Post by Investor on May 1, 2014 17:03:05 GMT
Just picked up a part. Doesn't look as if parts will hang around for long as I was beaten to the other one I was going to buy. People selling them and buying them back to test the system? Wonder if we need a setting on the loans page for it to auto-refresh every x seconds so we can see new loan parts live.
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Investor
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Post by Investor on May 1, 2014 16:59:16 GMT
Hi Ben, the complication arises when you factor in multiple buyers of the same loan part buying 10% of it today, 20% of it tomorrow etc.. the amount of interest would be reducing on a daily basis and make interest return calculations very complicated for sellers. Our indications from this forum was that investors like the uber simple SS model and we have factored this simplicity in to the secondary market offering. This is why we have chosen to freeze interest at point of placing loan part for sale. If the loan part sells immediately that day, then SS makes nothing. If it takes a day or two to sell then SS does make that interim interest. We intend to use any surplus interest that the secondary market generates to build a Saving Stream Provision Fund to benefit investor security. Andy I believe this answers, or at least begins to answer, your question. On a separate point this thread commenced with the quote "We can confirm there will be a secondary market for Saving Stream loans by 1st May 2014.". Low and behold 1st May comes and we have this new system live and available. Very rare to see things like this happening to the original established timescales so congratulations to SS for again showing us their commitment to open and honest discussion and information sharing. Will be interested to see the uptake on the secondary market, lots of previous discussion from members in this thread as to how it should be deployed and hope to see those with strong views start to sell some of their loan parts to show just how important this new system is to them. I will of course be buying them.
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Investor
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Post by Investor on May 1, 2014 16:32:25 GMT
Secondary market is now live on the website.
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Investor
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Post by Investor on Apr 30, 2014 13:59:11 GMT
In agreement with all so far. Better to have something in place as a secondary marketplace even if it may not meet every single investors unique and disparate requirement ;-). Still believe the Keep It Simple Stupid philosophy should continue to be applied to the website, I do not invest in any of the secondary marketplaces on other P2P sites based on the levels of unnecessary complexities involved in many of them.
Thanks for the prompt returns on PBL001 and PBL002 today.
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