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Well there is a train of thought that says there will always be people like me, especially having been in the S/W domain mot of their lives that know the difficulties that can arise in any S/w project. I have been retired form the real world - need a better term but it will do - since the age of 53 having been very fortunate - more than most that is - to be afforded the ability to do what I want rather than have to be employed by someone. I was always very interested in s/w from an early age and it followed that I was going to find an outlet albeit more a hobby than a job. In stepped excel 2007 - i used this in a very small way when I was developing and designing large scale systems but for us it was systems like oracle, mainframes and the emerging vax systems when I first started.

Zopa back in 2015 decided to change their excellent online loanbook tools where one was able to see loans and their statements and payments at the loan level. It was very fast and useful. In mid 2015/16 I think they had to make changes and I'm guessing that the original tools were designed and implemented by people who had long since moved on and docs were not that easy to follow if they existed at all. They had some problems remoulding the loanbook to what it is now and as a result they removed these useful capabilities - the emerging tablet/phone domains may have been a factor too. It was not much of an issue to me as it was yet another challenge to mould my excel tools into storing the statements data and rebuilding any loan to be able to track payments again locally. It's main task these days enables me to be able to see last payments at the loanbook level as well but that's another story - the shear amount of data involved for just one product, having been in zopa since 2006, means the loaders and cross connected structures take nearly 10 minutes on my super duper desktop pc for the larger books. 

Anyway all these now rather cumbersome tools are still useful but along the way I also discovered the power of XIRR, i'm still not wholly convinced about it and it's easy to get it wrong but it does seem to give better overview picture over a period - I keep rolling 12 months as well as alltime XIRR's (10 years now in Zopa). The NAR that zopa provides is still in my view not a great way to view things as despite all the defaults it seems to still be increasing. My jury is out on that one.

I also track top level statements data monthly and that means I can see when something happens there as it did pre 2015 a while back. It took Zopa some while to both accept and then find where the errors that meant the data supplied suddenly dropped value wise for our invest side, less so for ISA's I guess as the changes were in older than ISA data was created.

So really and truly I guess I just have years of experience in the field to know that things are never 100% right (management and the 80/20 rule has a lot to answer for too) and more so the way the new generation just thinks they can do these things on the fly and call it progress - iterative change is not a reason for chucking good QA. It's not just in p2p either its a more general issue and in extremes I'm guessing Boeing's recent problem with the MAX aircraft are the most stark example of s/w being most definitely fallible - well not the software itself but the people who both create it and then fail to document and test it!.

Some might I'm just sad old git but I derive pleasure from this stuff so its not a task but a challenge. Even Mrs Aju has accepted the value especially when she goes shopping