Loan Release Options

Voted

I agree that the site needs to be able to cope with the demand.

The issue of giving everyone a fair chance to be involved in every loan is not one that I expect will concern SS too much, and I imagine that as long as they can continue to offer the great rates that they currently do, and continue to avoid defaults that result in loss of interest and/or capital, they will have a long queue of people wanting to invest.

Lenders clearly want to invest a lot more in the site than they currently are, and until that imbalance is resolved (the most obvious way seems to be by bringing in more loans), some people will end up unhappy - either people who couldn't get online quickly enough to invest (status quo), or people who were online but were limited to investing a fraction of what they wanted to (if some sort of cap is introduced).

Like the idea of more advanced notice, but do not understand why anybody would want capped loans.

Advance notice with the site as it is will only make yesterdays problems worse I feel.
There is really nothing wrong with things how they are imo, but the server issues really do need to be sorted out.

As long as people can accept that this will delay the launch of loans. Is SS have to give a definitive release date/time they will have to have had all the relevant paperwork completed before they give notification. I much prefer release immediately once they have everything ready to go, appreciate this causes a scrum but the load on the servers will be MUCH worse if they give a specific start time. Hence why some form of capping (even first two hours) may be beneficial.

davex, the point of capping is to give more people the chance to participate, by limiting how much can be bought initially by each investor. Among other things that would give those who work nights or who can't do personal things during daytime working more chances to participate. It's a form of rationing that's useful while there is more investor demand than loan supply, one which can relieve pressure on a platform to take loans that they would prefer not to take, by cutting down dramatically on the number of lender customers who are disappointed by not participating. A further positive effect is that it reduces the surge demand on servers at the platform by eliminating the the huge initial rush to get in before a loan fills. That gets deferred instead to the time when any cap is removed, if there's still money available to invest at that point, but with far fewer likely to participate at that time because many will already be satisfied. A negative aspect is that those with more money to invest can become frustrated and might not consider it worthwhile to invest for the duration of a cap.

If the caps are such that a loan doesn't fill for say 24 hours I doubt that most would care much about notice because the time to fill would do effectively the same job. Notice but no cap is likely to be favoured by those who want to invest much more money than a cap and who are also able to invest during SavingStream's normal working hours.

If pre-announcing an early to mid evening start time may well be best. Many daytime workers should be home at that time and able to participate even if they can't do personal things at work and it's likely to be before many night workers start work. Trying to start on different days can help with those working shift patterns.

In general I favour caps and perhaps eventually queues as well because they satisfy the largest possible number of investors, even if eventually most might end up with less participation than they might want. At least such a situation improves lender diversification, vs the "hurray, I got her in time, I'll bid all I can to make up for the ones I didn't get" or "this platform is a waste of time because I can never get into loans" alternatives.