My summary from a newbie

I tried to join Assetz. But of all the P2P sites I'm now using (which are most of them), it's been the only one who has managed to make a complete mess of my identity check. It's a shame as it looks like an interesting site.

If you could let me know your contact details via a PM I'll make sure you are called on Monday by our customer care team.

A further point loosely connected to point 4 above. This involves the suspended BL items and the time it might take to get your money back from one of these.

So far AC have been good at recovering the first defaulting loan, FF. However there are now a growing number of BL's getting into difficult territory and it is currently difficult to predict what the outcome from these will be. I made a personal decision to withdraw my holdings in AC back last autumn but at the time seven were in suspension. One (FF) has been partially recovered but the other six are still in various states of difficulty with no clear sign of resolution. The problem with these six is that the original LTV on average was 70% but now with our punitive rate of interest at 18% building up plus the costs of recovery this is rapidly being eroded. Worse still in a couple of cases and from the information available it looks like the original valuations may have been somewhat on the optimistic side. Further some of the borrowers seem to have been trained by the Awkward Brigade and are unlikely to yield without considerable and possibly expensive pressure.

In a nutshell from the current information available from AC and my own personal experience my guess is that I am going to have to wait a long while to get my money back and the longer it goes on the greater the chance of only a partial recovery of what is owed to me.

To any new entrant into P2P my advice would be to be aware that when things go wrong with a loan it can take a long while to get sorted. Secondly don't be hoodwinked into believing that because a loan is backed by property your money is safe because that is not always true!

If you sign up to AC there is no obligation to fund your account, and you will then have access to the loan book both active and repaid loans. Any automatically compiled stats would be pretty meaningless as many of the "repaid" loans were created by the work-arounds needed on the original AC website to allow default interest to accrue on distressed loans. Hence some anlaysis of the repaid loans is needed.

AC opened for business just under 2 years ago. No capital or interest has been written off to date.  One distressed loan (FF Ltd) has been recovered (all capital and normal interest), although it could be another 12-18 months before we know whether the default interest on that loan that accrued is recoverable or has to be written off.  Most of the other distressed loans are part way through recovery actions which could last for another couple of years in some cases.  On two or possibly threee of the distressed loans, a capital loss looks a distinct possibility. But until AC has been going 5 to 10 years very little can be concluded regarding actual bad debt performance as each loan is different. 

Its worth noting that the recovery on FF Ltd was remarkably quick. Some of my distressed loans on Funding Circle have taken 2 to 3 years to reach the point that recovery payments are being received, and it could be 8 years before I'll know how much has to be written off.

One other important point. As described above, setting targets for loans that often have units available will get you access to those loans but its manual. 

The two reasons to use AC are that soon you will have the choice of several automatic investment accounts that select specific types of loans and will automatically buy them even when you are not watching and without any need to have set a target manually.

Another method will be the Bespoke Investment Accounts coming shortly - these will let you define your own automatic purchase filter again avoiding needing to set targets on individual loans.

Which is why it is important when considering lending on such loans to note whether interest for the full term is being retained at drawdown (as has been the case with most AC and SS bridging loans) hence preserving the LTV through to the end of the term (assuming no change in asset value of course).

Bear in mind substantial interest is retained on account when the advance is made so the 70% LTV includes that cash making it safer than it seems. This is typical bridging industry policy.