Out for now

Found myself with more cash than I can invest in Faulty Calculations after lack of interesting loans over festive period. Have removed excess and put into GBBA and it's all been invested within 24 hours. 0% as cash in Failing Cashback or 7% in GBBA? I know where I prefer to be.

Around a year and a half ago we made the decision to take out the process of manually picking and choosing loan units within a loan on the aftermarket.  All loan units in a given loan are the same rate (bar two historical exceptions) so it doesn't matter to the lender which one they pick, but more importantly we saw the issues FC were having with bots and knew our own automation tools were coming.

Bots are a big issue on the "simpler" sites as FC have long struggled with and we're now seeing on SS.  They're impossible to reliably detect and ban, and it's usually lenders with deep pockets who cause the most issues through automated bot use who the platforms don't want to alienate.  In the GEIA and GBBA, and to a lesser extent now the QAA, you have "institutionalised" bots who would always have faster fingers than manual investors.

So the decision was taken to do away with the concept of fastest finger first.  Instead you manually choose which loans you want to invest in, the amount you want to invest, deposit a pool of funds, and then the system invests that pool of funds in those loans as they become available.  The GEIA and GBBA are extensions of this whereby we set investment criteria to choose which loans are invested in.  An offshoot of this is that we are also able to balance / distribute sales across lenders in a more equitable way instead of allowing those with more spare time (or better bots) to grab all they want with those who are unable to be so involved being disadvantaged.

At the same time we also removed the primary market for most lenders, so all loans are already funded when they draw down and are then sold on to retail investors. There's no primary and secondary market, just the marketplace.  That also means you don't have to worry about investing via two different systems - you just set your targets in the loans you're interested in. 

I'm convinced that these mechanisms work well and will scale well.  The underlying systems are complex but the way in which a user interacts with them is simple once the concept is understood.  Set your targets and make sure you have funds available.  However as jonah mentions sales in the last year have not lived up to expectations and the platform has more lenders than borrowers.  That is changing steadily, with record loan origination in the last quarter which will filter through into drawn loans this quarter.

One of my major focuses for the next six months will be ease of use of the platform.  The underlying concepts are right we're just not communicating them very well and could do far more to guide new users through the platform.

Where we do get things right though is that we have an excellent customer services team.  If you do ever get stuck or want guidance as to how the platform works please get in touch with them as they'll do all they can to help you, including nagging me into making things clearer on the site.

At the beginning AC was a bit strange to me as it is very different than others platforms.

But now I love the hands off approach. I just set my limits for each loan I'm interested in and forget. Every day I get some shrapnel, sometimes even bullet or grenade. I check my account every few days and top up my account with new funds if all/mist is invested.

The manual account allows you exactly that.  You choose the loans you want to invest in and the amount you want to invest, the system then handles the dirty details of deploying your cash by buying specific loan units.  It's 100% your choice which loans you invest in and how much you invest (subject to supply and demand).

The other investment accounts remove that manual choice and instead apply investment criteria to choose which loans your funds are invested in.  But you don't have to use them at all if you don't want to.

QAA is deliberately more black box but we're talking about bringing more transparency to this over the next few months.  There's a lot of competitive interest in how the QAA operates which is partly why we've not been as open in discussing the internal operation.

Unfortunately that approach no longer works - if you wish to maintain the same limit, you need to watch out for capital repayments and manually adjust your buying instruction by the same amount.

That is not a fair comment. Talking about myself, I can never fully understand how a system works before I try it and test it. In the case of p2p platforms this entails transferring money in and invest, while trying to go through all the possibilities that the particular platform offers.