Post by chris on Sept 9, 2015 9:33:25 GMT
In our testing prior to go live of the QAA we've run into an issue with the display of loan holdings that is a carry over from when the site first launched and I wanted to get some quick feedback on the best way forward. When we launched loan holdings were always in whole pennies and there was some pooling of fractions of pennies behind the scenes to compensate with precise interest amounts. For example over a period of six months you could receive interest payments of 10p, 10p, 11p, 10p, 10p, 11p. When loan units were bought and sold they were for whole pennies and the accumulated portion would pass over to the purchaser in effect as a free bonus of up to 1p.
Last October we updated the system to run to 20 decimal places and started reporting loan holdings to that full accuracy however this caused a shift in lender holdings of up to 1p per loan unit held. At the time loan units were limited to £100 so there was on average a 0.5p discrepancy per £100 invested, although that could vary if you also bought smaller loan units. In response to the confusion we reverted to displaying loan holdings to 2 decimal places with holdings being rounded up. You may have a loan unit worth 99.5p that is displayed as being worth £1. Come to sell that loan unit and it's only worth the 99.5p so you would sell 99p and be left holding 0.5p.
The October update also allowed us to merge loan units together which then caused the difference in rounding to be magnified as all these loan units were now reset back to with 1p of true holdings instead of accumulating lots of small discrepancies. Unfortunately that feature was accidentally switched off a couple of months ago so discrepancies have been slowly accumulating again.
This latest release of the aftermarket allows for fractions of a penny to be bought and sold which allows lenders to use up the final little parts of their funds and we have also reenabled the merging of loan units. However this then magnifies the discrepancies once again which is going to cause it to look like lenders are gaining pennies here and there, when they aren't actually doing so.
I have three options available and I need to make a decision within the next couple of hours.
Last October we updated the system to run to 20 decimal places and started reporting loan holdings to that full accuracy however this caused a shift in lender holdings of up to 1p per loan unit held. At the time loan units were limited to £100 so there was on average a 0.5p discrepancy per £100 invested, although that could vary if you also bought smaller loan units. In response to the confusion we reverted to displaying loan holdings to 2 decimal places with holdings being rounded up. You may have a loan unit worth 99.5p that is displayed as being worth £1. Come to sell that loan unit and it's only worth the 99.5p so you would sell 99p and be left holding 0.5p.
The October update also allowed us to merge loan units together which then caused the difference in rounding to be magnified as all these loan units were now reset back to with 1p of true holdings instead of accumulating lots of small discrepancies. Unfortunately that feature was accidentally switched off a couple of months ago so discrepancies have been slowly accumulating again.
This latest release of the aftermarket allows for fractions of a penny to be bought and sold which allows lenders to use up the final little parts of their funds and we have also reenabled the merging of loan units. However this then magnifies the discrepancies once again which is going to cause it to look like lenders are gaining pennies here and there, when they aren't actually doing so.
I have three options available and I need to make a decision within the next couple of hours.
