G.Wellesley,Ian Gurney & 28 other P2P Lending Experts-3 Tips

There must be something I'm misunderstanding here.  Once you have the quotes in the 'Preview'/'Create Post' window, all you should need to do is delete the parts of the quote that are irrelevant to the reply you're writing.  (If you're dealing with what someone else has written, ISTM that it's bad form to do anything other than delete bits.  I certainly wouldn't like it if someone ascribed a quote to me that I didn't actually make!)

I'll try the code tab, thanks, tricksy's the word frequently gets me.

mikes1531 I only add to rather than delete parts of quotes when my cursor erratically decides to, think someone else mentioned it tends to be a problem with tablets and pads, and of course I hope I catch most of them and wouldn't intentionally let them go live.

Lets consider the conflicts of interests between platforms and lenders with some specific examples:

Zopa: used to let lenders set their rates. Replaced that with a system where the platform sets the rates. The same platform that makes its money from loan volume but not the interest rates. Rates fell, many investors ended up leaving and becoming regular posters here, though not all.

Bondora: investors learned that it was a bad idea to lend to Spain or Slovakia. Bondora removed the option to select the country when using their automated lending tool. So the sensible investors stopped using it, though newcomers won't know any better. As with Zopa, Bondora makes its money from loan volume, not interest rates received by lenders.

Platforms have their positive points but a key tip is to remember that your interests as an investor and the interests of the platform are not necessarily aligned. The platform usually isn't your friend, it's usually competing with you for a cut of the borrower's money, without taking the lending risk that you're taking.

Platforms can get quite clever at doing things like this. For example, Zopa charges variable fees and used to publish them, but stopped. The fees could be anything from nothing to a few hundred Pounds depending on the market a borrower was assigned to and the amount borrowed. I think that those who lend can see the fees after lending but it's no longer possible to see them in advance or work out the split between platform and investor. My guess at the moment is that more than 50% of the money paid by the borrower at Zopa is going to Zopa, more if its protection fund is included. Want to make more money? Get your platform to take less of it... but don't expect the platforms to point this out to journalists or investors.

If you want an idea for an article, try getting all of the platforms to add up all fees and interest paid by a borrower and then tell you what percentage of that goes to the investors, after allowing for all fees charged to lenders, and what percentage to the platform. Then when you have that, post in the relevant sections here so the experts in each platform can tell you if the platform forget to mention anything.

It's not talked about much but there are platforms that make money by charging a cut of the money received by lenders. That's inherently better alignment of risk and reward between platform and investors.

For platforms that have institutional investor APIs and which publish return and bad debt figures, try getting them to disclose what the consumer investors get after those using the API have had their turn at taking the best deals and how that differs from what the institutions using their automation API get.

P2P is good but not without its interesting little niches.