nothing lent on ISA side on 25th

Hello aju, yes it is interesting. The thing that really puzzles me, though, is that the weekly report provides average queue/match speeds for each product.  IIRC, it slowed to 5 days for Core in the last report, 72 hours for the week before but just 48 hours for around a month before that.

Historically, I've always found the average lending speed pretty accurate. But on this basis Mr Misotu's full allowance should have been lent out months ago. 

How has your lending speed been compared to the published "average"?

Well, there's no caveat in the weekly reports and in my correspondence with Zopa they haven't indicated that the data for lending speed can't be relied on. So I'm relying on it as a rough guide. As you say, average figures are just that, and I realise that there will be a spread.

But this is actually the nub of my conversation with Zopa: at what point does a individual account's deviation from the average become unacceptable?

If, on average, funds are lent out in 48 hours consistently for a long period, is it acceptable that my £2000 takes, say, a year to lend? How about six months? How about a month? How about two weeks? 

I know that funds have remained unlent in Mr Misotu's account for over a month at a time when I lent £9000 in about a week, topping up the account with new funds on a daily basis. Clearly, my rate was at the higher end, his at the lower end of the range. But this is a huge range - I would say unacceptably so unless there is a serious factor affecting the lending speed for a particular account.

In fact, since my projected rate is 0.3% below average, his 0.2% above, the situation should have been the reverse of what I saw. As you observed, when your funds are matching quickly, the rates tend to be lower.

I don't know if there are fewer secondary market loans now, but I do know that the proportion of Safeguard loans is holding steady for Mr Misotu's lending at 28.1%.

I had a holding reply on 6 October from Zopa saying "Over the past two days I have spent time with the lead member of our Investor Tribe pulling the data and platform information relevant to fully answer all of your points, and whilst this has been of great use, we need some further time to ascertain as to the reason behind the lending speeds on your husbands account vs platform expectations."

Fair enough, but there's been nothing since.

I am trying not to let the term "Investor Tribe" shake my confidence in them as a serious organisation. I tell myself that I have become deeply cynical over the years  

Well, I've had a reply from Zopa.

They confirm that my husband's account has been "de-prioritised". This, apparently, is because his account has a projected return "around" that projected for the Core product (actually 0.2% above).

The algorithm, they advise me, is prioritising those above or below projected. 

The data shows that my husband had funds in matching for more than a month in both September and October. This at a time when average matching has been from 48 hours to 7 days, according to the weekly report. Understand that, given around £1900 on offer, 190 different loans are needed for £10 chunks. But as Zopa says, the secondary market is very "healthy". For some reason, Mr M's Safeguard % is around 28% - well short of the average which, according to Zopa, was 50% a short while ago. My own loanbook is over 70% Safeguard. So he's not seeing very much of that healthy secondary market, either.

Now I understand some tweaking has to happen in order to balance rates and so on. But I am arguing that the extent to which his account has been deprioritised is unreasonable. I've looked at the period for which you kindly provided data:

Date                    New Loans

                           aju        Mr M
 
01/10/2017     3            2
02/10/2017     19         17
03/10/2017     18         15   
04/10/2017     10          8  
05/10/2017     90         12
06/10/2017     0            9
07/10/2017     0            4
08/10/2017     3            3
09/10/2017     16          15
10/10/2017     12          12
11/10/2017     7            10

So on the whole, his matches track yours except on the 5th. But that delivers 178 matches vs 107 matches over that period. Which is quite a disparity. I don't think he has made more than 20 matches in one day since the middle of August.

Right now, the repayments from his ISA and the tiny repayments transferred from his Classic account (around £3,500 on loan) are again outstripping the amounts he is lending. In the last 4 days, he has made just 8 matches. Which probably means it has been slow across the platform for the last few days. But this is *way* off the matching rates indicated by the weekly report (4 days for Core).

I am girding my loins to explain to the "Investment Stakeholders"* that while a certain amount of algorithmic tweaking of individual lending is obviously necessary, the extent to which the algorithm is deprioritising Mr M's funds is unacceptable and results in a fairly large sum languishing in matching for artificially long periods earning nothing. They don't understand why Mr M won't happily sacrifice himself on the altar of Zopa Corporate Objectives.

Wish me luck.

* not sure what happened to the "Investment Tribe". I hope they're ok.