New loan about to hit FC, and a question to the mods

Not a formal admin response as yet, just my initial thoughts.

In THEORY promoting the loan on here by an individual could be viewed as in breach of "The forum may not be used by individuals to solicit loans or investments, or to advertise goods or services."

However I think this would fall into a different category and not really what was intended by this rule. Namely promotion of an existing loan application on a p2p platform.

Personally experience says that forum members welcome dialogue with a borrower. I would suggest that rather than you promoting the loan here, that the greatest benefit would be for your friend to register and have a dialogue on the board if they wish to promote the loan after listing. This would enable direct dialogue. That said, FCs Q&As are also there for that purpose.

Reference making personal relationship known in your case. Etiquette says absolutely. I suspect that if you started singing the praises of a loan application with no obvious reason to do so you might quickly get 'spotted' by the crowd, which would be a worse outcome anyway.

Investing or not on your own account: That's your call, not something anyone else can help with.

Actually even 'don't identify the borrower here' is clearly (IMO) not applicable if the =borrower= opens an account and says 'hey, I'm the borrower of loan XYZ at Flimsy Custard'. Of course Flimsy Custard's T&Cs might prevent that (I'm imagining they might try!), but I don't see why the forum would be compromised.

Thanks all for the responses .

I guess my starting point is that I used to work in the securities industry, and were the equivalent to have happened there I would effectively have had to have been "wall crossed" because I had access to non-public information. As a result I would have been prohibited in trading instruments associated with that company, or investing in the company on a personal account, for a period of time.

I realise that the comparison isn't perfect, but it did make me think about p2p cases where a potential investor has, similarly, access to non-public information, or equivalently has a relationship with a potential borrower that is undeclared. But on a forum like this it would be nigh on impossible to enforce that, hence my reference to the forum rules (and "etiquette"). I also take blender's point about not "over regulating",

My use of the word "promote" was innappropriate. What I was trying to get at was, for instance, a situation where I could say "look, I know the person, and I know the business, and it's throwing off cash far more healthily than might be apparent from the filed Companies House accounts". Or, conversely, "the accounts paint a prettier picture than the reality" (not that my friendship would last in such a situation .

I think that the prospective borrower is unlikely to sign up here. In the general case one of the attractions of a facility like FC is precisely the disintermediation between a borrower and hoardes of prospective lenders. However, if the loan goes live, and if it attracts a bunch of questions / scrutiny, I might suggest it to him.... This might also be different across different platforms.

As for the loan in question, I'll wait until it goes live before making any decisions about bidding on it / investing in it. 

So in the end it went to the whole loans market.  Rated C, he borrowed £50,000 at 11.4%.  I'm still waiting on the process details though....