niceguy37
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Post by niceguy37 on Oct 30, 2014 11:08:42 GMT
I guess AC's development teams will have their hands full for a little bit ironing out teething troubles on the new website for a bit, and introducing the Green Energy Income Account and Auto-Diversification, but I thought it would be helpful to create a wish-list of suggested improvements for the new website, for users and AC to consider, so they can judge user support, and add some of our ideas to their planned developments.
I'll kick off with:
On the statement export, it's fine having a narrative, but it does make it harder to analyse in a spreadsheet. It would nice if the narrative data was in separate columns: eg Purchase/Sale/Interest repayment/Principal repayment/Transfer In/Transfer Out/etc, Loan Name, Loan number, Part Id. Amount, Principal amount, Loan Rate
With the new website making lots of smaller transactions, I think it will be useful to have separate columns, to make sorting and filtering much easier.
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Post by chris on Oct 30, 2014 11:26:38 GMT
I guess AC's development teams will have their hands full for a little bit ironing out teething troubles on the new website for a bit, and introducing the Green Energy Income Account and Auto-Diversification, but I thought it would be helpful to create a wish-list of suggested improvements for the new website, for users and AC to consider, so they can judge user support, and add some of our ideas to their planned developments. I'll kick off with: On the statement export, it's fine having a narrative, but it does make it harder to analyse in a spreadsheet. It would nice if the narrative data was is separate columns: eg Purchase/Sale/Interest repayment/Principal repayment/Transfer In/Transfer Out/etc, Loan Name, Loan number, Part Id. Amount, Principal amount, Loan Rate With the new website making lots of smaller transactions, I think it will be useful to have separate columns, to make sorting and filtering much easier. That would be a big change. The narrative is stored as text, although we're now starting to attach meta data in a more usable form to transactions. Over time this will become easier to do but it's not a quick fix.
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ianb
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Post by ianb on Oct 30, 2014 13:47:00 GMT
I think the above suggestion from niceguy37 would be a tremendous improvement, and would allow user to do so much more with the statement. I'd add one further suggestion, to move out the numeric month number to a separate column to facilitate pivot tables like interest amount by month by loan. Though it sounds a substantial change in total, having a more flexible statement prevents the need for a lot of additional fixed rports as part of the product. |
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Post by chris on Oct 30, 2014 14:32:07 GMT
I think the above suggestion from niceguy37 would be a tremendous improvement, and would allow user to do so much more with the statement. I'd add one further suggestion, to move out the numeric month number to a separate column to facilitate pivot tables like interest amount by month by loan. Though it sounds a substantial change in total, having a more flexible statement prevents the need for a lot of additional fixed rports as part of the product. The flip side is that with flexible reports all lenders then benefit not just those who are comfortable with excel, etc. Over time we'll try and accommodate both.
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kermie
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Post by kermie on Oct 30, 2014 19:31:07 GMT
My pet favourite suggestion (which I know Chris has said is mostly coded - just trying to keep it high up the list  ): notifications/alerts. Ideally configurable for each lender. Alerts (email/SMS) for: i) loan updates ii) loan missed payments iii) Q&A answers iv) drawdowns v) coming-soon loans vi) any change to credit position of a loan vii) new loan documents available - e.g. site reports for "development loans" etc etc |
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Post by cyrilmadrid on Oct 30, 2014 21:53:53 GMT
Most useful for me would be to highlight the status of the loan : performing, non performing, ...
And flag new updates.
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Post by Duane Dibley on Oct 31, 2014 9:18:03 GMT
Include the amounts deposited to fulfill shadow bidding in the 'Your Total Investment' figure.
I'm losing track of what shadow bids I've made, what have already been settled and what's still outstanding.
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TFTO
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Post by TFTO on Oct 31, 2014 11:07:32 GMT
I would like some form of shadow bidding re-introduced, which would save having to keep money in the cash an/or AI (it sure isn’t manual in my book) accounts. A target figure could be set, as now, and if the system buys anything an email, text or notes on the Dashboard or all three could alert the lender to top up their investment within 48 hours to cover the new purchases. Interest would only start accruing once funds had been received.
Of course, if AC could sort out the deposit nonsense with the banks, so that funds are credited instantly, the 48 hour period could be reduced.
The current situation requires far too much money to be tied up doing nothing, precisely the situation which led to shadow bidding being introduced on the old system.
Something along the lines of a 10% credit limit would be fine by me.
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niceguy37
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Post by niceguy37 on Oct 31, 2014 11:39:46 GMT
I would like some form of shadow bidding re-introduced, which would save having to keep money in the cash an/or AI (it sure isn’t manual in my book) accounts. A target figure could be set, as now, and if the system buys anything an email, text or notes on the Dashboard or all three could alert the lender to top up their investment within 48 hours to cover the new purchases. Interest would only start accruing once funds had been received. Of course, if AC could sort out the deposit nonsense with the banks, so that funds are credited instantly, the 48 hour period could be reduced. The current situation requires far too much money to be tied up doing nothing, precisely the situation which led to shadow bidding being introduced on the old system. Something along the lines of a 10% credit limit would be fine by me. It is tricky keeping a balance ready to invest in the Manual Investment Account, without a fair bit of monitoring, and obviously this balance is not earning interest. I'm hoping when the Auto-Diversification feature comes in we will be able to specify a list of loans we're happy to sell off to pay for any really desirable loan parts that become available. But I definitely agree that it would be great to deposit funds more quickly.
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Post by chris on Oct 31, 2014 21:54:39 GMT
I would like some form of shadow bidding re-introduced, which would save having to keep money in the cash an/or AI (it sure isn’t manual in my book) accounts. A target figure could be set, as now, and if the system buys anything an email, text or notes on the Dashboard or all three could alert the lender to top up their investment within 48 hours to cover the new purchases. Interest would only start accruing once funds had been received. Of course, if AC could sort out the deposit nonsense with the banks, so that funds are credited instantly, the 48 hour period could be reduced. The current situation requires far too much money to be tied up doing nothing, precisely the situation which led to shadow bidding being introduced on the old system. Something along the lines of a 10% credit limit would be fine by me. The lack of instant deposit is due to FCA regulation which prohibits us from clearing funds on to the platform until they are cleared in our bank account. Debit cards are not instant deposit in that sense, and our reading of the regulations prohibits reliance on knowing the funds cannot be charged back we need actual cleared funds, so the only option would be for us to transfer funds into the client money account when the debit card payment is made and then transfer them out again when the funds from the lender clear. We're not allowed to just leave a sum sat in there. Other platforms can get around this by either having deep enough pockets to do this, along with appropriate back office solutions or manpower, or by you purchasing the loan unit's off the platform rather than another lender, so that they can apply the delay on withdrawing those funds rather than the purchase. Another alternative would be tracking which funds are cleared and which are not through the platform and not letting lenders withdraw uncleared funds. So lender A could instant deposit some funds, buy loan units from lender B, but lender B couldn't withdraw that cash until lender A's funds had cleared into our client money account. I've dismissed that as being impractical. There may well be other solutions but those are the ones I'm aware of. We're working on a "within an hour or two" deposit system for bank transfers, and we're working on other instant or rapid deposit solutions. These are moving at the dizzying speed of a rampaging bank so could take a while, but they are high on our list of priorities for the business.
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Post by chris on Oct 31, 2014 21:59:24 GMT
I would like some form of shadow bidding re-introduced, which would save having to keep money in the cash an/or AI (it sure isn’t manual in my book) accounts. A target figure could be set, as now, and if the system buys anything an email, text or notes on the Dashboard or all three could alert the lender to top up their investment within 48 hours to cover the new purchases. Interest would only start accruing once funds had been received. Of course, if AC could sort out the deposit nonsense with the banks, so that funds are credited instantly, the 48 hour period could be reduced. The current situation requires far too much money to be tied up doing nothing, precisely the situation which led to shadow bidding being introduced on the old system. Something along the lines of a 10% credit limit would be fine by me. It is tricky keeping a balance ready to invest in the Manual Investment Account, without a fair bit of monitoring, and obviously this balance is not earning interest. I'm hoping when the Auto-Diversification feature comes in we will be able to specify a list of loans we're happy to sell off to pay for any really desirable loan parts that become available. But I definitely agree that is would be great to deposit funds more quickly. Auto-diversification will start off being for the products only (both platform and lender created), as they'll invest funds as fast as they can and then look to diversify working towards balancing the interest rate being earned (vs a target rate) the minimum rate acceptable and a diversification factor. I can easily open up those same controls to manual investments but I don't think they'll satisfy the majority of lenders. Adding in other controls is going to increase complexity, both in terms of the user interface and in the back office algorithm, so would have to be something completed over time.
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jjc
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Post by jjc on Nov 3, 2014 11:12:04 GMT
Top item for me. As would be anything else that helps hands-free/low maintenance management for manual investors. Good to see it's top of the list. Updates section mentioned by others hence also very welcome.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Nov 3, 2014 22:29:54 GMT
Here are a few hopefully simple ones...
Put the Browse All Loans views into better order. Unlike the listings of my Loan Book, which are in alphabetic order, these are not. I suspect they're in some sort of date order, but the dates aren't visible so I can't really tell. Is think that if one particular order had to be imposed then alphabetic would be best. Even better would be the ability to click on a column heading and sort the lists based on that column's contents.
Our requests that the lists not necessarily be broken up into small pages were acted upon. But requests for similar changes to statements have not. It's been les than two weeks since the new website went live, and my MLIA statement already is spread over nine pages! This make it quite difficult to search for any particular transaction without downloading the statement into a spreadsheet program.
I realise that the Opt-Out feature hasn't been implemented yet, but if you opt-out of a given loan you are allowed to enter a comment that you can see when you look at the list of your opted-out loans. It would be very nice to have a similar feature for all loans. But the comments should be editable, so that if you think of something you want to add or change you can do so. (With Opt-Out, I can find no way to edit the comments -- you have to cancel the Opt-Out completely and then reinstate it in order to be able to access the comment entry box which, of course, is empty so you have to re-enter the comment from scratch again.) Also, the list of Opted-Out loans is not in alphabetic order.
Make it possible to see when loans' next payments are due from the summary tables rather than having to go to each loan's page and click on the Repayments tab.
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Nov 4, 2014 2:48:44 GMT
Here's another one...
Could we have an indicator somewhere that tells us whether the units in a particular loan can be sold or not? Under the old system if we selected a unit from our list of holdings and tried to sell it, sometimes the system would respond by saying that the unit could not be put up for sale because there was an overdue payment so we'd know we'd have no joy and that we needed to sell something else instead in order to raise the cash we want. With the new system, there's no such message. And whereas each loan unit under the old system used to be classified as either 'live' or 'for sale' so that you could see what was for sale and what wasn't, that information is no longer available.
So if you want to raise some money and adjust your target investment to be less than your current holding, the system now responds by showing those numbers on all displays. But if you happen to have selected a loan to sell that has an overdue payment, there'll be no indication that none of your units actually are for sale, so you could wait a rather long time for those units to turn into cash.
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unmadem
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Post by unmadem on Nov 4, 2014 11:50:30 GMT
A nice easy one.
On the Your Loans/Repaid list can you add the loan id. It is on the Active list but not the Repaid one. Personally I'd be happy for it to replace the thumbnail image as I don't think it adds much.
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): notifications/alerts.