Reserve feature

I read it through once and came to the same conclusion as you, but thought i might have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. Yes, it's a bit poor isn't it - the golden chance to tie up our money on pipeline loans that may not even come to fruition?  There's only been one loan I've seen so far that flew off the shelves (a 25% LTV), so I'm not convinced I see the value.

kuflink Olivia , a much more enticing and investor-friendly approach would be for investors to earn 'instant returns' when they bid their funds a'la  Ablrate or FundingSecure. Any chance this could be considered to perhaps increase the uptake of this feature?

I reluctantly agree. 

I fail to see how the reserve feature in any way changes the problem of popular loans filling quickly - they will fill just as quickly when they are made available for reservation.

The announcement wasn't helped by Kuflink messing up on both of the 2 new loans made available for reservation.  Both had 1st charge in the text and then stated 2nd charge in the summary template (both have now been corrected). 

Either they don't have a compliance officer, or they need a new one - at any FCA regulated firm the terms of an investment should be double-checked and signed off prior to marketing.

Not kuflink's finest hour and they can ill afford to treat their lenders (a.k.a. cheap leverage providers) as idiots at this stage in their development.

marka r00lish67 keyboardworrier peerlessperil

Many thanks for your feedback and I acknowledge all your views. Apologies for the charge information. We have a new system in place and I believe we need to tighten our screws on DD post pushing data onto our staging platform. peerlessperil I can assure you, we have a full time compliance officer in place monitoring all our promotion material. All our team members are required to pass our compliance test (Compliancy Guru) before taking on their roles.

I would also like to bring to your attention, we have a fair number of new team members who have recently joined the company and they are being brought up to speed with the systems / procedures in place. Having said that, please accept our unconditional apology for the faux pas regarding the charge information.

On the issue of pipeline deals, we had some mixed views. A few of our investors felt that they missed out on deals by the time they topped up their wallet and got an opportunity to invest. The deals that have made it through to the platform (pipeline included) are always vetted by our credit committee. Whilst we can't guarantee the deals will 100% go through, the credit committee take a view they are well on track to completion. Pledged funds are still classified as client funds and sit in our segregated client account, this is just a way to ensure that some of you don't miss out on a good deal.

I agree on setting a limit as suggested by keyboardworrier on the pledged amount making it a fair playing ground for everybody. I would like to remind you all, you can still pull out of your pledge by going through to the "My Investments" (top right menu) link.

r00lish67, I hope para 3 has answered some of your queries i.e we only put deals into the pipeline that have a high likelihood of making it through.

I do see your point regarding "instant returns" and will have to understand Funding Secure's structure on their implementation. In our case however, I believe it will falter on the issue of compliance, the process is a bit more complicated. I'll give a brief explanation; since Kuflink limited is a facilitator and not the originator of the loan, paying returns from Kuflink's pocket is not something the FCA would be happy about (please don't quote me on this but I am 99% certain). Kuflink Limited's role is to ensure all parts of the contracts are executed;
Borrower has funds -> Kuflink limited on it's books now starts to calculate interest (we reserve interest funds daily in our client account) that has to be paid at the end of the month (or loan end date, whichever comes first). 


Please let me know if these answers have helped in any way. If not, @danny and I would be more than happy to get more information for you all. We welcome all feedback.

Hari

marka - in all honesty, yes it does lead to the same problem hence I am with you all on the fact that we should cap investors to a certain level. This however is a compliance question and we are looking into it. I like the idea of having a deal pipeline and perhaps users could mark them for say, send me a notification when the deal goes online. Users have been given enough notice so can load up their wallet. Add to that the limit, the system works.

On point of allowing for transfers after making an initial pledge, the system could get fairly complicated. We give users a unique reference per investment to transfer funds and many a times users are limited (or don't want to) in adding their new unique reference. Also, I believe the FCA won't be happy on reservations, again please don't quote me on this but we looked into it in the past and our compliance team wasn't happy with the idea.

Kind regards,
Hari

Hi jnm21,

I am glad to hear that you are interested in our platform. Thanks for your suggestions. This is certainly something I will forward over to our directors as a way to improve our reserve feature. 

If you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to message me.

Kind regards,
Danny

You could implement a 'bottom up' process for allocating loans, similar to Lendy. If the reservations are over subscribed everyone receives the lowest amount, then this is incremented in stages until eventually big investors receive their full allocation only if funds permit.

Hello Liz, 

You are correct, reserve deals are those that have not yet drawn down, and live deals are those that have drawn down!

Olivia.