Website comments and questions

Having just trawled through every loan, I found one which had a target of £5000! I was never interested in that loan & never went anywhere near it from day 1. Where did that come from? Suffice to say I used the 'opt-out' option on that & a few others. Wonder if it will make a difference & if I'll end up with some units still once some come on AM?

Manual investment is always on, but if your holding and target are equal then it will ignore you.  There's still a debate to be had around auto diversification and whether that too should operate on manual investments.

At the moment you have to have a target, it's your current holdings.  When the site was set live if you had an active auto invest target then that target was used otherwise it was set to your current holdings.  There has been an oversight where if you had a different target set in AI and had disabled either buying or selling then that has been incorrectly ignored as it wasn't mapped to the new system which doesn't have those concepts.  What we should have done is in those instances instead set the target to be your current loan holding.  This was a last minute change as our original intention was to ignore the old AI settings completely but there were complaints on this forum that several lenders had spent a lot of time reviewing loans and setting targets so we imported the settings - apologies that this has caused further issue.

I'm not sure how best to correct for that now - I suspect that if I start making blanket changes to the settings then it's going to overwrite changes that people have made since then which will cause as much anger as if I leave it as is.  You can quickly see all your holdings and targets via the loan book screen (https://www.assetzcapital.co.uk/investments/loan-book) so I'm tempted to leave it as is and ask lenders to set their targets to whatever level of investment they actually want.

That the target doesn't track principal repayments - this is identical to the old system.  Indeed there was a debate on this forum about whether or not it should.  I have a solution in mind so that it will count down with each repayment as they're made, but suspect that this will still cause confusion.  For example if you set your target to £500 but nothing is immediately available and then a loan repayment occurs, should your target adjust?  Should it only track your current holdings and not scale the rest, should it scale everything, etc.  I don't remember there ever being a consensus on how it should work last time it was discussed, so for now it is set to copy the old behaviour but I am happy to discuss this further and come up with a solution everyone is happy with.

Where this has caused confusion is that the system can now buy and sell in much smaller units.  Loan units are no longer held in £100 chunks, each lender will usually end up with one loan unit in each loan for each method of investment used.  As such we had to support merging and splitting of loan units to any arbitrary size, which has also meant that anyone looking to sell can sell any amount making it much easier to buy and sell loan units.  This freedom has allowed the system to adjust your investments, as instructed but perhaps not intended.  However I repeat this is not a change in behaviour but one of opportunity for the system to make an adjustment.  If a £1 loan unit had come up for sale on the old site then that same £1 adjustment would have been carried out there.

The other thing to remember is that all of these changes are built upon more automated systems in order to still give lenders as much manual control as is practical.  Both API based investments and fully automated investments on platform are coming soon and with that there'd be no way of competing manually, it wasn't at all practical to retain a fully manual process much in the same way as you see automated bidding starting to dominate sites like Funding Circle.  Using manual invest and setting your target will give you the same opportunity as any of the other methods of investing the platform supports whilst still letting you choose which loans you want to put your money in to.  If you want a more fire and forget approach where you don't have to micro-manage your loan book then there will be products for you.  And if you fancy programming the site to run your investment strategy how you see fit then that facility will be there as well.  But for those who don't want to use those tools there will still be this existing manual investment option, and their opportunity to invest will not be any different to those using the other solutions.

All of this is already coded and live on the site with the interface hidden, so all of that complexity and those systems are there in operation behind the scenes and everything you see has to work in tandem with those solutions.  There are commercial not technical reasons why they haven't launched yet but they will be released in the coming days and weeks.

The accrued interest is only showing for those loan units you still hold.  Calculating the accrued interest for loan units you've sold is a computationally expensive operation which is usually only carried out at point of payment, and for which we need to build a caching layer.  This will be sorted in the next couple of days, but what is displayed does not affect what is actually paid out.

Bumping this to a new page so more people will see it.

We've not made any changes, and it's impossible for me to change your statement once transactions are settled without bypassing a lot of safety checks (which no one else in the business has access to).

The old system used to use your cash account for all activity, hence the items on the statement, whereas all new activity is segregated.  There's no real elegant solution to that so it's just something lenders will need to get used to.