Assetz Tie-up With The Interface Financial Group (IFG)

duck I for one am not negative about this proposed offering and I am sure this applies to other posters on this thread. It is just that many of us can see what we assess as better (more competitive) offerings elsewhere. I am sure that what AC are planning to do will suit a lot of investors and particularly those that are of the shoot and forget inclination who don't what to actively manage their investments.

Unless I have misunderstood the nature of this account it will not be a short term loan. My understanding is that it will be a generic account investing across the board of all loans available with automatic re-investment very much like Wellesley. The components of the account may be short term but the account itself may be longer term. I have based this assumption on Stuart Law's comment about AC spreading the risk across investments.

AC started with very explicit statements about the inadequacy of platforms business plan assumptions regarding so called "provision funds", and how top grade asset security was superior in just about every respect.

On being challenged on their provision fund "protected" Green Energy Investment Account, and their change of policy, all that came back was "thinking changes".

No doubt that will be AC will always be "changing their thinking" as the platform develops. We can take it or leave it. Let's hope "old thinking" which is good is not automatically thrown out by "new thinking" (which may or may not be good) regardless. AC often ask our opinions, so I am optimistic that we will be always given a choice of opportunities which are more than competitive with alternative platform offerings.

Considering the market for which the GEIA appears to be best suited, IMHO AC are going to have to adopt the latter approach if they want the GEIA to be successful.  If they don't, they will limit their audience to those investors looking for 3-year fixed-rate bonds.  And the way things are at the moment, perhaps even fewer than that -- because an investor has very little control over how their money is deployed within a GEIA.  Someone who invests today and sees their money invested in loans -- all of which mature within the next three years -- could find that two years from now their money has been 'rebalanced' into a completely different set of loans which still are three years from maturity.

So AC need to make the exit path from the GEIA much clearer.  A few people on the forum have experimented with the GEIA, including me.  I've not tried to reduce my GEIA investment so I have no direct experience to report, but a couple of others have and their progress has been slow.  One reported yesterday that his GEIA has not sold anything for three weeks.

I am not sure that the liquidity v rate tradeoff works for me I am afraid. There are just too many places with a similar level of risk boasting superior liquidity and return. Consider, for example, that you can purchase a diversified basket of preference shares via an ETF yielding 6-7% with almost no bid-offer spread, stable pricing and instant liquidity. 

Not all accounts will but we want to offer a variety of risk offerings for investors.  Not all investors want the same level of risk, and as we edge towards ISA monies, a lower risk lower return offering is needed.

As always we continue to listen to our lenders and what they want.  The self managed investment accounts won't have provision funds.

Stable pricing? Are you not exposed to large swings in capital value due to changes in [expected] interest rates? I have some prefs in my portfolio but I'm not rushing to add at the moment because I think the interest rate risk is pretty one-sided.