Post by marie on Sept 18, 2017 9:33:00 GMT
I've had a reply from Zopa regarding my suggestions/questions email that I sent them after they requested feedback in the weekly update. I'll paste it here in its entirety as I think it will be of interest to all:
Good morning *****,
Thank you for writing to Zopa. We appreciate customers who let us know where we can improve.
As the ISA and the standard account are two separate portfolios of investments, we must isolate the two data so there is no confusion when interpreting the information. There is, however, the ability to merge both the ISA and non-ISA loan book by copying a pasting the cells from one spreadsheet onto another. *1
I can completely appreciate that there can be some misinformation/misunderstandings on the P2P forums. I can confirm that we do monitor the forums, however, we only post on the forums if the information provided by some forum users is grossly incorrect as we do like to promote active discussion on the topics that are brought up. *2
I apologise if there has been some miscommunication with the technical problems we have been experiencing lately with the website or with the changes on the platform. One of Zopa’s values is to be transparent to customers and I will be passing this feedback as I do appreciate that having a notification when there is a problem will be most helpful.
With the statements page, just to reassure you, the repayments are being returned to the account as normal, it is purely the reporting of this information on your statements page which is where the issue lies. I can assure you that our Technical Team are currently working on a fix with the statements page, and we hope to resolve the issue over the next few weeks. We are looking at some wider changes on presentation of accounts, including the reporting defaults and earnings, please look for these in the near future.
I can appreciate your comment about being able to view your product performance, however, the difficulty with actual returns is that it’s limited by several factors, such as when and how frequently the product was funded, the timeframe of the investment, and if the reinvesting feature has been enabled. We therefore currently do not display an actual rate per product net of bad debt, although Zopa is looking in ways to improve the projected rate to assess an investor's personal portfolio. *3
When a borrower defaults, the loan gets passed onto our Recoveries department where they would take the necessary steps to retrieve the money that is owed to the investor. The primary objective is to get in touch with the borrower using many methods of communication such as text, email, calls and letters. Once they get in contact with the borrower, they would then try to come to an arrangement based on their circumstances. If need be, we will then obtain a county court judgement (CCJ). We don’t provide statistic on recoveries as it might give a sense of false expectation for investors. This being said, I think it will be a good idea to release a blog on our recovery process which I will raise with the team that deals with our external communication. *4
Thanks once again for all the suggestion you have provided in this
email, I will forward these suggestions to the relevant department. If you have any further queries or concerns, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Kind regards
xxxx xxxx
Client Services
My comments:
*1 - So it looks like we will not be having a summary page for all investments with Zopa. I am disappointed by this, and by the "solution" they provide that is to just copy everything from the two all time loan books together into one spreadsheet.
*2 - I cannot remember seeing any posts from any official Zopa representative over the last year that I have followed this forum. Maybe someone else will be able to comment on this?
*3 - This too I am disappointed by. Other platforms are able to supply this despite facing the same challenges as Zopa (example: Vanguard. Not P2P but same principles apply), and we are also able to find this ourselves although it takes some effort to collect the stats from all over the site. Our calculations might differ and might be slightly inaccurate, but I am sure everyone who has a substantial amount of money in Zopa knows approximately what their ROI is.
*4 - The excuse given not to supply us with more information and statistics on this does not sit very well with me. They don't think we can handle the facts because it will give us false expectations? Very poor.
Edit: formatting
Edit2: Words are hard.
Good morning *****,
Thank you for writing to Zopa. We appreciate customers who let us know where we can improve.
As the ISA and the standard account are two separate portfolios of investments, we must isolate the two data so there is no confusion when interpreting the information. There is, however, the ability to merge both the ISA and non-ISA loan book by copying a pasting the cells from one spreadsheet onto another. *1
I can completely appreciate that there can be some misinformation/misunderstandings on the P2P forums. I can confirm that we do monitor the forums, however, we only post on the forums if the information provided by some forum users is grossly incorrect as we do like to promote active discussion on the topics that are brought up. *2
I apologise if there has been some miscommunication with the technical problems we have been experiencing lately with the website or with the changes on the platform. One of Zopa’s values is to be transparent to customers and I will be passing this feedback as I do appreciate that having a notification when there is a problem will be most helpful.
With the statements page, just to reassure you, the repayments are being returned to the account as normal, it is purely the reporting of this information on your statements page which is where the issue lies. I can assure you that our Technical Team are currently working on a fix with the statements page, and we hope to resolve the issue over the next few weeks. We are looking at some wider changes on presentation of accounts, including the reporting defaults and earnings, please look for these in the near future.
I can appreciate your comment about being able to view your product performance, however, the difficulty with actual returns is that it’s limited by several factors, such as when and how frequently the product was funded, the timeframe of the investment, and if the reinvesting feature has been enabled. We therefore currently do not display an actual rate per product net of bad debt, although Zopa is looking in ways to improve the projected rate to assess an investor's personal portfolio. *3
When a borrower defaults, the loan gets passed onto our Recoveries department where they would take the necessary steps to retrieve the money that is owed to the investor. The primary objective is to get in touch with the borrower using many methods of communication such as text, email, calls and letters. Once they get in contact with the borrower, they would then try to come to an arrangement based on their circumstances. If need be, we will then obtain a county court judgement (CCJ). We don’t provide statistic on recoveries as it might give a sense of false expectation for investors. This being said, I think it will be a good idea to release a blog on our recovery process which I will raise with the team that deals with our external communication. *4
Thanks once again for all the suggestion you have provided in this
email, I will forward these suggestions to the relevant department. If you have any further queries or concerns, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Kind regards
xxxx xxxx
Client Services
My comments:
*1 - So it looks like we will not be having a summary page for all investments with Zopa. I am disappointed by this, and by the "solution" they provide that is to just copy everything from the two all time loan books together into one spreadsheet.
*2 - I cannot remember seeing any posts from any official Zopa representative over the last year that I have followed this forum. Maybe someone else will be able to comment on this?
*3 - This too I am disappointed by. Other platforms are able to supply this despite facing the same challenges as Zopa (example: Vanguard. Not P2P but same principles apply), and we are also able to find this ourselves although it takes some effort to collect the stats from all over the site. Our calculations might differ and might be slightly inaccurate, but I am sure everyone who has a substantial amount of money in Zopa knows approximately what their ROI is.
*4 - The excuse given not to supply us with more information and statistics on this does not sit very well with me. They don't think we can handle the facts because it will give us false expectations? Very poor.
Edit: formatting
Edit2: Words are hard.
.