Discussion on RYI requests and tracking (RS)

Your assumptions assume no new lending.  I suspect that there might be quite a bit of re-financing occurring, eg. if a £200k development facility expired today - a new facility could be granted with new money for, say another 6/12 month term.  Using your assumptions 50% of the existing investors would get repaid, the over 50% would go back into the market but the whole facility amount would need to be drawn from the market.  There is probably also more straightforward lending occurring as well. Both of these would slow RYI progress.

On the bright side, re-financing should mean greater contributions being made to the PF and I would also expect large repayments to come in when the world returns to normal.

My working assumption is now that there is pretty much zero chance of getting my RYIs from Access (made on 16th and 17th March), unless something really radical changes, like Ratesetter bringing a big institutional investor onboard which seems highly unlikely. So, locked in for the duration of the underlying loans, with fingers firmly crossed that the PF doesn't get crushed by a Tsunami of Covid induced bad debt in the meantime, or the ultimate nightmare scenario, that Ratesetter itself goes bust. There is an old investment saying for when the risk/reward balance is completely out of kilter: 'picking up pennies in front of a steamroller'. Having an investment with Ratesetter currently feels like exactly that.

Given all of the above, should RS really have the right to reinvest our capital and interest repayments?  We have signalled our wish to leave the platform and have our money returned to us.  In normal circumstances we would have been repaid.  The fact that we are not in normal circumstances should not allow RS to reinvest on our behalf.  Setting reinvestment rates at 8% provides some protection, but surely nobody thinks it is appropriate that we need to logon to the platform on a regular basis (potentially for the next 5 years) to avoid the risk that these are scooped up and relent against our expressed wishes.  
I have written to the Ombudsman along these lines.  

I totally agree with this. Over 90% of my Access portfolio is stuck in just two 1yr loans. I don't have the option of withdrawing capital repayments each month like the majority of other investors in the Access account.

I would happily transfer these loans to the 1yr market and even pay the withdrawal fee. Anything is better than being stuck in the near-stationary Access queue.

If it makes you feel any better, I would actually rather my Access was invested in 1 year loans like that. At least you know the date in the next year when you can get your money back. The average duration of my access loans is 25 months, with several at 57 months. 'Access', yeah right!

Likely human error IMO

Unless something has changed RYIs required manual intervention, so its possible the way the request is displayed to the operator has meant on occasion errors have happened, such as processing multiple RYIs across morethan one market instead of just 1