Chris and Andrew Q&A

Hi Andrew,

Assetz produced a compelling renewable energy guide, which helped me understand how half an acre of sheep grazing upland is a valuable and secure investment. You stated in a thread on May 2nd that Assetz would be producing a similar educational document for cash flow lending loans. I wondered if the document was produced.
I would also like to see a document that explains why a PG with an Assetz loan has more credence than those of other P2P lending platforms. These documents might help some 'slow to fill' loans.

Updates, particularly on drawdown, always seem a bit sporadic. It looked at one stage as if we were going to get an update on each outstanding loan every Friday, but then a Friday goes by with no updates at all. When you ask a question in the Q&A, you often have to wait several days for a reply, yet two weeks will have elapsed since the last update, so the questions aren't unreasonable. Is there a plan to manage the communication aspect of drawdown better as well as the current plan to reduce drawdown times?

oldnick asked:


Several contributors have been critical of the sloppy proofreading of loan details by AC, necessitating more than one public correction on this forum. This must be an embarrassment for you and your team and I'd like to hear what plans you have to reduce the error rate.

(This was only reinforced for me by an error in the consent form for the transfer of my money to the new Client Money Account. If it's important that I must strike out either 'I' or 'we', why didn't anybody notice that I'm not given that option at the beginning of the second sentence?)

I can only reiterate what others have written before - where does this slackness stop in your organisation? Are we right to fear that the loan agreement paperwork is similarly littered with errors which a borrower could, one day, use to avoid repaying us?


I can only apologise that there have been some errors that have slipped through the net.  This has not just been on the credit reports but also some complaints on here that emails have not been responded too.  I do take a dim view of the latter and all emails should warrant a response.

In the last few days I have reiterated to the team the importance of you, our lenders, to this business and that customer service is paramount to our success.

In regards to legal documentation, this is undertaken by qualified lawyers for Assetz Capital and is protected by their Professional Indemnity insurance which is sufficient to cover all of the loans they have handled.  In addition to this, the original loan documentation suite was drawn up by DWF, one of the UK's largest law firms, and our client partner sits on DWF's executive board.  I feel that we are well protected in this area.

I'm thinking about the apparent slowness of sales on the after market:

I understand that quite a bit has been selling on the after market, and I'm sure a bunch of people are waiting for the repayment of the 3 bridging loans to re-invest. However have you seen any slow down in deposits in the last couple of months.

For example, I read yesterday that £5bn went into ISAs last month. Has this had an impact? Any extended comment?

In short, yes.

The responses we do are very much a manual process in that we are a people business and do not want to send out system generated emails.  As part of the growth plans for the business we are increasing the resource in the marketing team which will allow for improved communications, and we are also increasing the credit team which will allow for faster responses to your Q&As on each loan.  These should be in place in Q4 of this year.

Apology accepted, but I wonder whether a change of procedure is likely to produce better results than the occasional 'teamtalk'?
On the legal side, the permission form that we sign for you to transfer our money was presumably not produced by that legal team, hence the mistake. Does the document still stand as it is, without the I/we at the beginning of the second sentence or are you sending out new paperwork?