Expected repayments

Thanks for your comments Ace

It's worth noting that we didn't remove the old repayments page because we couldn't fix the errors - we removed it because we could not justify the heavy load on the system (to display the page the system needs to run through all chunks - in some cases many thousands - and calculate the proportional share of all future repayments - up to 60 for each chunk - within a few seconds) for something very few people were using, notwithstanding the comments re usefulness in this thread. We also received lots of queries from investors who didn't understand what it was showing e.g. if they were reinvesting.

Sure, we could create an overnight cron job and update this once per day, but we'd need a strong business reason to do this i.e. we would have to be sure it's actually what our customers want. I personally think the page could be much improved such that this isn't necessary. I think the most sensible and efficient way of doing this would be to show all individual contractual payments (grouped either by individual chunk or by day/week/month) for any single month selected by the user, rather than running 60 months of repayments on all loans at once. Many of the users of this page are simply keen to see what they're likely to receive in the coming month in the way of interest/capital.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

Hi again Matthew, and thanks for your reply. I do take your points.

Is keeping customers happy not considered to be a strong business case? I wouldn't have thought it wouldn't have taken longer than a man day of work for a competent softie to set up a cron job to do this. I do accept that I'm not well placed to judge how many of your customers value this feature, and that there hasn't been much of an outcry on this forum so far. If people didn't understand it perhaps it just needed to be explained better, though it seemed fairly obvious to me. As for few people using it, I'm tempted to use the car airbag analogy; I've never used mine, but I wouldn't like to be without them! (Ok, it's a rubbish comparison, but it's the best I could do after an evening out).

Regarding your proposed solution of giving details of contractual repayments for a single month at a time: I'd be ok with that as long as I could request the details of several months sequentially and view them concurrently. I.e. If you presented a list of months that I need to click on to expand the details of, and I could click on multiple months sequentially and then be able to scroll through the resultant list of multiple month details. I hope that makes sense, I'm not great with words. I'd be happy to wait a few seconds for each click to process a month if necessary.

Perhaps it would help if I describe a usecase that I've used the previous repayments function for, other than just being interested in the numbers. I help others manage their LW accounts and I have been asked more than once to determine when to turn off relending to be able to withdraw a specific sum on a specific date without needing to pay the withdraw fee. The simple solution was to use the old repayments tab to work this out by back calculating the total sum of expected interest and capital repayments from the required withdraw date. I fully understand and accept that a backup plan is required in case the expected repayments don't occur, but in all cases (Ok, to be honest it was only two cases) it worked perfectly.

I look forward to seeing what you produce. Is there a target release date?

Hi Matthew , I logged in to my LW account today and found something called a "Portfolio Projection" slap bang in the middle of my dashboard. I think this shows poor judgement on the part of LW, for the following reasons: (a) The dashboard is where I expect to see as clearly and easily as possible the state of my account without unnecessary clutter and so is poor webpage design.  (b) The information portrayed, how much a regular contribution at fixed interest will amount to after 25 years, is childish and irrelevant. If any P2P lender needs anything like that working out for them they should not be into P2P. In a way it says that you think lenders are thick.

Noted, thanks for the feedback. The intention behind it wasn't to encourage investors to invest regular contributions - it was really to address the many enquiries we receive about the impact of investing X amount over Y years with Z monthly top ups. Understand that not everyone will use it, and that's also fine.

Note also that the forecast was not intended as a direct replacement for the old repayments page - as per other comments on this thread, this will be back in one form or another.

Thanks

But Matthew, it seems to me in that chart that you're portraying a LW investment as if it's a fixed interest regular saver account. Superficially it may seem like that, but in reality it's nothing like that. You can't guarantee to offer the same interest rate for 25 years. There may well be capital losses in that time too. I am concerned that you are offering such misleading investment advice. I still maintain that if potential lenders need to ask the sort of questions you are attempting to answer then P2P is not for them. Perhaps you should be "referring them to an independent financial adviser".

That is true of the rate offerred, but not the risk of losses. realistically if it is not more likely than not that some losses will be made in 25 years, then too much is being put into the fund!